The Golden Rendezvous

Chapter 9

What with the darkness, my bad leg, the intermittent lightning, the wild rearing, wave-top staggering and plunging of the Campari, and the need to use the greatest caution all the way, it took us a good fifteen minutes to reach number four hold, far back on the afterdeck and when we got there, pulled back the tarpaulin, loosened a couple of battens, and peered down into the near-stygian depths of the hold, I wasn’t at all sure that I was glad we had come. Along with several tools I’d filched an electric lantern from the bo’sun’s store on the way there, and though it didn’t give off much of a light, it gave off enough to let me see that the floor of the hold was a shambles. I’d secured for sea after leaving Carracio, but I hadn’t secured for a near-hurricane, for the excellent reason that whenever the weather was bad the Campari had invariably run in the other direction.

But now Carreras had taken us in the wrong direction and he either hadn’t bothered or forgotten to secure for the worsening weather conditions. Forgotten, almost certainly; for number four hold presented a threat, to say the least, to the lives of everybody aboard, Carreras and his men included. At least a dozen heavy crates, the weight of one or two of which could be measured in tons, had broken loose and were sliding and lurching across the floor of the hold with every corkscrewing pitch of the Campari, alternately crashing into the secured cargo aft or the bulkhead forward. My guess was that this wasn’t doing the forward bulkhead any good, and just let the motion of the Campari change from pitching to rolling, especially as we neared the centre of the hurricane, and the massive dead weights of those sliding crates would begin to assault the sides of the ship. Buckled plates, torn rivets, and a leak that couldn’t be repaired would be only a matter of time.

To make matters worse, Carreras’ men hadn’t bothered to remove the broken, splintered sides of the wooden crates in which they and the guns had been slung aboard; they, too, were sliding about the floor with every movement of the ship, being continually smashed and becoming progressively smaller in size as they were crushed between the sliding crates and bulkheads, pillars and fixed cargo. Not the least frightening part of it all was the din, the almost continuous goose-pimpling metallic screech as iron-banded cases slid over steel decks, a high-pitched grating scream that set your teeth on edge, a scream that invariably ended, predictably yet always unexpectedly, in a jarring crash that shook the entire hold as the crates brought up against something solid. And every sound in that echoing, reverberating, emptily cavernous hold was magnified ten times. All in all, the floor of that hold wasn’t the place I would have chosen for an afternoon nap.

I gave the electric lantern to Susan, after shining it on a vertical steel ladder tapering down into the depths of the hold.

“Down you go,” I said. “For heaven’s sake, hang on to that ladder. There’s a baffle about three feet high at the bottom of it. Get behind it. You should be safe there.” I watched her climb slowly down, manoeuvred two of the battens back into place over my head no easy job with one hand and left them like that. Maybe they would be jarred loose; they might even fall down into the hold. It was a chance I had to take; they could only be secured from above. And the covering tarpaulin could also only be secured from above. There was nothing I could do about that either. If anyone was crazy enough to be out on deck that night especially as Carreras had no life lines rigged the chances were in that blinding storm they wouldn’t even notice the flapping corner of the tarpaulin or, if they did, they would only either pass it by or, at the most, secure it. If someone was cunous enough to go to the length of pushing back a batten — well, there was no point in worrying about that.

I went down the hatch slowly, awkwardly, painfully — Marston had a higher opinion of his anaesthetics than I had and joined Susan on the floor behind the baffle. At this level the noise was redoubled, the sight of those head-high behemoths of crates charging across the hold more terrifying than ever. Susan said, “the coffins, where are they?”

All I had told her was that I wanted to examine some coffins. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what we might find in them.

“They’re boxed. In wooden crates. On the other side of the hold.”

“The other side!” She twisted her head, lined up the lantern, and looked at the sliding wreckage and crates screeching and tearing their way across the floor. “The other side! We would — we would be killed before we got halfway there.”

“Like enough, but I don’t see anything else for it. Hold on a minute, will you?”

“You! with your leg! You can’t even hobble. Oh no!”

Before I could stop her, she was over the baffle and half running, half staggering across the hold, tripping and stumbling as the ship lurched and her feet caught on broken planks of wood, but always managing to regain balance, to stop suddenly or dodge nimbly as a crate slid her way. She was agile, I had to admit, and quick on her feet, but she was exhausted with seasickness, with bracing herself for the past hours against the constant violent lurching of the Campari; she’d never make it.

But make it she did, and I could see her on the other side, flashing her torch round. My admiration for her spirit was equailed only by my exasperation at her actions. What was she going to do with those boxed coffins when she found them, carry them back across the floor, one under each arm?

But they weren’t there, for after she had looked everywhere she shook her head. And then she was coming back and I was shouting out a warning, but the warning stuck in my throat and was only a whisper and she wouldn’t have heard it anyway. A plunging, careening crate, propelled by a sudden vicious lurch as the Campari plunged headlong into an exceptional trough, caught her back and shoulder and pitched her to the floor, pushing her along before its massive weight as if it were imbued with an almost human inhumanuality of evil and malignance and determined to crush the life out of her against the forward bulkhead. And then, in the last second before she would have died, the Campari straightened, the crate screeched to a halt less than a yard from the bulkhead, and Susan was lying there between crate and bulkhead, very still. I must have been at least fifteen feet away from her, but I have no recollection of covering the distance from the baffle to where she lay and then back again, but I must have done; for suddenly we were there in a place of safety and she was clinging to me as if I were the last hope left in the world.

“Susan!” My voice was hoarse, a voice belonging to someone else altogether. “Susan, are you hurt?”

She clung even closer. By some miracle she still held the lantern clutched in her right hand. It was round the back of my neck somewhere, but the reflected beam from the ship’s side gave enough light to see by. Her mask had been torn ff; her face was scratched and bleeding, her hair a bedragled mess, her clothes soaked and her heart going like a captive bird’s. For an incongruous moment an unbidden recollection touched my mind, a recollection of a very cool, very poised, sweetly malicious, pseudo-solicitous young lady asking me about cocktails only two days ago in Carracio, but the vision faded as soon as it had come; the incongruity was too much.

“Susan!” I said urgently. “Are you “I’m not hurt.” She gave a long, tremulous sigh that was ore shudder than sigh. “I was just too scared to move.” he eased her grip a trifle, looked at me with green eyes enormous in the pallor of her face, then buried her face my shoulder. I thought she was going to choke me. It didn’t last long, fortunately. I felt the grip slowly easing, w the beam of the lantern shifting, and she was saying in n abnormally matter-of-fact voice: “there they are.” I turned round and there, not ten feet away, they were deed. Three coffins — Carreras had already removed the cases — and securely stowed between baffle and bulkhead and added with tarpaulins, so that they could come to no harm.

Tony Carreras kept on repeating, his old man didn’t miss much. Dark, shiny coffins with black-braided ropes and brass handles. One of them had an inlet plaque on the lid, copper or brass, I couldn’t be sure.

“That saves me some trouble.” My voice was almost back normal. I took the hammer and chisel I’d borrowed from the bo’sun’s store and let them drop. “This screw driver will all I need. We’ll find two of those with what’s normally side them. Give me the lantern and stay there. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“You’ll be quicker if I hold the lantern.” Her voice matched my own in steadiness, but the pulse in her throat was going like a trip hammer. “Hurry, please.”

I was in no way to argue. I caught the foot of the nearest coffin and pulled it towards me so that I could have room to work. It was jammed. I slid my hand under the end to lift it and suddenly my finger found a hole in the bottom of the coffin. And then another. And a third. A lead-lined coffin with holes bored in the bottom of it. That was curious, to say the least.

When I’d moved it far enough out, I started on the screws. They were brass and very heavy, but so was the screw driver I’d taken from Macdonald’s store. And at the back of my mind was the thought that if the knockout drops Dr. Marston had provided for the sentry were in any way as ineffective as the anaesthetic he had given me, then the sentry would be waking up any minute now. If he hadn’t already come to. I had that coffin lid off in no time at all.

Beneath the lid was not the satin shroud or silks I would have expected but a filthy old blanket. In the Generalissimo’s country, perhaps, their customs with coffins were different from ours. I pulled off the blanket and found I was right. Their customs were, on occasion, different. The corpse, in this case, consisted of blocks of amatol. All block was clearly marked with the word, so there was no mistake about it — a primer, a small case of detonators, and a compact square box with wires leading from it, a timing device probably.

Susan was peering over my shoulder. “What’s amatol?”

“High explosive. Enough there to blow the Campari apart.” She asked nothing else. I replaced the blanket, screwed on the lid, and started on the next coffin. This, too, had holes in the underside, probably to prevent the explosives sweating. I removed the lid, looked at the contents, and replaced the lid. Number two was a duplicate of number one. And then I started on the third one. The one with the plaque. This would be the one. The plaque was heart-shaped and read with impressive simplicity: “Richard Hoskins, senator.” just that.

Senator of what I didn’t know. But impressive. Impressive enough to ensure its reverent transportation to the United States. I removed the lid with care, gentleness, and as much respectful reverence as if Richard Hoskins actually were inside, which I knew he wasn’t.

Whatever lay inside was covered with a rug. I lifted the rug gingerly; Susan brought the lantern nearer, and there it lay, cushioned in blankets and cotton wool. A polished cylinder, seventy-five inches in length, eleven inches in diameter, with a whitish pyroceram nose cap. Just lying there, there was something frightening about it, something unutterably evil; but perhaps that was just because of what was in my own mind.

“What is it?” Susan’s voice was so low that she bad to come closer to repeat the words. “Oh, Johnny, what in the world is it?”

“The twister.”

“The — the what?”

“The twister.”

“Oh, dear God!” She had it now. “This — this atomic device that was stolen in South Carolina. The twister.” She rose unsteadily to her feet and backed away. “The twister!”

“It won’t bite you,” I said. I didn’t feel too sure about that either. “The equivalent of five thousand tons of T.N.T. Guaranteed to blast any ship on earth to smithereens, if not actually vaporise. And that’s just what Carreras intends to do.”

“I-I don’t understand.” Maybe she was referring to the actual hearing of the words — our talk was continually being punctuated by the screeching of metal and the sounds of wood being crushed and snapped to the meaning of what I was saying. “You when he gets the gold from the Ticonderoga and tranships it to this vessel he has standing by, he’s going to blow up the Campari with — with this?”

“There is no ship standing by. There never was. When he’s loaded the gold aboard, the kind-hearted Miguel Carreras is going to free all the passengers and crew of the Campari and let them off in the Fort Ticonderoga. As a further mark of his sentimentality and kindness he’s going to ask that Senator Hoskins here and his two presumably illustrious companions be taken back for burial in their native land.

The captain of the Ticonderoga would never dream of refusing — and, if it came to the bit, Carreras would make certain that he damned well didn’t refuse. See that?” I pointed to a panel near the tail of the twister.

“Don’t touch it!” If you can imagine anyone screaming in a whisper, then that’s what she did.

“I wouldn’t touch it for all the money in the Ticonderoga,” I assured her fervently. “I’m even scared to look at the damned thing. Anyway, that panel is almost certainly a timing device which will be preset before the coffin is transhipped. We sail merrily on our way, hell-bent for Norfolk, the army, navy, air force, F.B.I., and what have you — for Carreras’ radio stooges aboard the Ticonderoga will make good and certain that the radios will be smashed and we’ll have no means of sending a message. Half an hour, an hour after leaving the Campari — an hour, at least, I should think; even Carreras wouldn’t want to be within miles of an atomic device going up — well, it would be quite a bang.”

“He’ll never do it — never.” The emphatic voice didn’t carry the slightest shred of conviction. “The man must be a fiend.”

“Grade one,” I agreed. “And don’t talk rubbish about his not doing it. Why do you think they stole the twister and made it appear as if Dr. Slingsby Caroline had lit out with it? from the very beginning it was with the one and only purpose of blowing the Fort Ticonderoga to kingdom come. So that there would be no possibility of any comeback, everything hinged on the total destruction of the Ticonderoga and everyone aboard it, including passengers and crew of the Campari. Maybe Carreras’ two fake radiomen could have smuggled some explosives aboard but it would be quite impossible to smuggle enough to ensure complete destruction. Hundreds of tons of high explosives in the magazines of a British battle cruiser blew up in the last war, but still there were survivors. He couldn’t sink it by gunfire — a couple of shots from a moderately heavy gun and the Campari’s decks would be so buckled that the guns would be useless — and even then there would be bound to be survivors. But with the twister there will be no chances of survival. None in the world.”

“Carreras’ men,” She said slowly, “They killed the guards in this atomic research establishment?”

“What else? And then forced Dr. Caroline to drive out through the gates with themselves and the twister in the back. The twister was probably en route to their island, by air, inside an hour, but someone drove the brake wagon down to Savannah before abandoning it. No doubt to throw suspicion on the Campari, which they knew was leaving Savannah that morning. I’m not sure why, but I would take long odds it was because Carreras, knowing the Campari was bound for the Caribbean, was reasonably sure that she would be searched at her first port of call, giving him the opportunity to introduce his bogus Marconi man aboard.”

While I had been talking I’d been studying two circular dials inset in the panel on the twister. Now I spread the rug back in position with all the loving care of a father smoothing out the bedcover over his youngest son and started to screw the coffin lid back in position. For a time Susan watched me in silence, then said wonderingly, “Mr. Cerdan. Dr. Caroline. The same person. It has to be the same person. I remember now. At the time of the disappearance of the twister it was mentioned that only one or two people so far know how to arm the twister.”

“He was just as important to their plans as the twister. Without him, it was useless. Poor old doc Caroline has had a rough passage, I’m afraid. Not only kidnapped and forced to do as ordered, but knocked about by us also, the only people who could have saved him. Under constant guard by those two thugs disguised as nurses. He bawled me out of his cabin the first time I saw him, but only because he knew that his devoted nurse, sitting beside him with her dear little knitting bag on her lap, had a sawed-off shotgun inside it.”

“But but why the wheel chair? Was it necessary to take such elaborate?”

“Of course it was. They couldn’t have him mingling with the passengers, communicating with them. It helped conceal his unusual height. And it also gave them a perfect reason to keep a nonstop watch on incoming radio messages. He came to your father’s cocktail party because he was told to — the coup was planned for that evening and it suited Carreras to have his two armed nurses there to help in the takeover. Poor old Caroline. That dive he tried to make from his wheel chair when I showed him the earphones wasn’t made with the intention of getting at me at all; he was trying to get at the nurse with the sawed-off shotgun, but Captain Bullen didn’t know that, so he laid him out.” I tightened the last of the screws and said, “don’t breathe a word of this back in the sick bay — the old man talks non-stop in his sleep — or anywhere else. Not even to your parents. Come on. That sentry may come to any minute.”

“You you’re going to leave that thing her?” She stared at me in disbelief. “You must get rid of it you must!”

“How? Carry it up a vertical ladder over my shoulder? That thing weighs about three hundred fifty pounds altogether, including the coffin. And what happens if I do get rid of it? Carreras finds out within hours. Whether or not he finds out or guesses who took it doesn’t matter: what does matter is that he’ll know he can no longer depend on the twister to get rid of all the inconvenient witnesses on the Campari. What then? My guess is that not one member of the crew or passengers will have more than a few hours to live. He would have to kill us then no question of transhipping us to the Ticonderoga. As for the Ticonderoga, he would have to board it, kill all the crew, and open the sea cocks. That might take hours and would inconvenience him dangerously, might wreck all his plans. But he would have to do it. The point is that getting rid of the twister is not going to save any lives at all; all it would accomplish is the certain death of all of us.”

“What are we going to do?” Her voice was strained and shaky, her face a pale blur in the reflected light. “Oh, Johnny, hat are we going to do?”

“I’m going back to bed.” Heaven only knew I felt like it. Then I’ll waste my time trying to figure out how to save Dr. Caroline.”

“Dr. Caroline? I don’t see — why Dr. Caroline?”

“Because he’s number one for the high jump, as things stand. Long before the rest of us. Because he’s the man who’s going to arm the twister,” I said patiently. “Do you think he’ll transfer him to the Ticonderoga and let him acquaint the captain with the fact that the coffin he’s taking back to the states contains not Senator Hoskins but an armed and ticking atom bomb?”

“Where’s it all going to end?” There was panic, open panic, in her voice now, a near hysteria. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it. It’s like some dark nightmare.” She had her hands twisted in my lapels, her face buried in my jacket well, anyway, her old man’s jacket and her voice was muffled. “Oh, Johnny, where’s it all going to end?”

“A touching scene, a most touching scene,” a mocking voice said from close behind me. “It all ends here and now. This moment.”

I whirled round, or at least I tried to whirl round, but I couldn’t even do that properly. What with disengaging Susan’s grip, the weakness in my leg, and the lurching of the ship, the sudden turn threw me completely off balance and I stumbled and fell against the ship’s side.

A powerful light switched on, blinding me, and in black silhouette against the light I could see the snub barrel of an automatic.

“On your feet, Carter.” There was no mistaking the voice. Tony Carreras, no longer pleasant and affable, but cold, hard, vicious, the real Tony Carreras at last. “I want to see you fall when this slug hits you. Clever-clever Carter. Or so you thought. On your feet, I said! Or you’d rather take it lying there? Suit yourself.”

The gun lifted a trifle. The direct no-nonsense type, he didn’t believe in fancy farewell speeches. Shoot them and be done with it. I could believe now that he was his father’s son. My bad leg was under me and I couldn’t get up. I stared into the beam of light, into the black muzzle of the gun. I stopped breathing and tensed myself. Tensing yourself against a.38 fired from a distance of five feet is a great help, but I wasn’t feeling very logical at the moment.

“Don’t shoot!” Susan screamed. “Don’t kill him or we’ll all die.”

The torch beam wavered, then steadied again. It steadied on me. And the gun hadn’t shifted any that I could see. Susan took a couple of steps towards him, but he fended her off, stiff-armed. “Out of the way, lady.” I’d never in my life heard such concentrated venom and malignance. I’d misjudged young Carreras all right. And her words hadn’t even begun to register on him, so implacable was his intention. I still wasn’t breathing and my mouth was as dry as a kith.

“The twister!” Her voice was urgent, compelling, desperate. “He’s armed the twister!”

“What? What are you saying?” This time she had got through. “The twister? armed?” The voice malignant as ever, but I thought I detected overtones of fear.

“Yes, Carreras, armed!” I’d never known before how important lubrication of the throat and mouth was to the human voice; a buzzard with tonsillitis had nothing on my croak. “Armed, Carreras, armed!”

The repetition was not for emphasis; I couldn’t think of anything else to say, how to carry this off, how to exploit the few seconds’ grace that Susan had bought for me. I shifted the hand that was propping me up, the one in the black shadow behind me, as if to brace myself against the pitching of the Campari. My fingers closed over the handle of the hammer I’d dropped. I wondered bleakly what I was going to do with it. The torch and the gun were as steady as ever.

“You’re lying, Carter.” The confidence was back in his voice.

“God knows how you found out about it, but you’re lying: you don’t know how to arm it.”

That was it: keep him talking, just keep him talking. “I don’t. But Dr. Slingsby Caroline does.”

That shook him, literally. The torch wavered. But it didn’t waver enough.

“How do you know about Dr. Caroline?” He demanded hoarsely. His voice was almost a shout. “How do you…”

“I was speaking to him to-night,” I said calmly. “Speaking with him! But but there’s a key to arm this. The only key to arm it. And my father has it.”

“Dr. Caroline has a spare. In his tobacco pouch. You never thought to look, did you, Carreras?” I sneered.

“You’re lying,” he repeated mechanically. Then, more strongly: “Lying, I say, Carter! I saw you tonight. I saw you leave the sick bay — my God, do you think I was so stupid as not to get suspicious when I saw the sentry drinking coffee given him by kind-hearted Carter? Locked it up, followed you to the radio office and then down to Caroline’s cabin. But you never went inside, Carter. I lost you then for a few minutes, I admit. But you never went inside.”

“Why didn’t you stop us earlier?”

“Because I wanted to find out what you were up to. I found it.”

“So he’s the person we thought we saw!” I said to Susan. The conviction in my voice astonished even myself. “You poor fool, we noticed something in the shadows and left in a hurry. But we went back, Carreras. Oh yes, we went back. To Dr. Caroline. And we didn’t waste any time talking to him either. We had a far smarter idea than that. Miss Beresford wasn’t quite accurate. I didn’t arm the twister. Dr. Caroline himself did that.” I smiled and shifted my eyes from the beam of the torch to a spot behind and to the right of Carreras. “Tell him, doctor.”

Carreras half turned, cursed viciously, swung back. His mind was fast, his reactions faster; he’d hardly even begun to fall for the old gag. All he’d allowed us was a second of time, and in that brief moment I hadn’t even got past tightening my grip on the hammer. And now he was going to kill me.

But he couldn’t get his gun lined up. Susan had been waiting for the chance; she sensed that I’d been building up towards the chance.

She dropped her lantern and flung herself forward even as Carreras had started to turn and she ad only about three feet to go. Now she was clinging desperately to his gun arm, all her weight on it, forcing it down towards the floor. I twisted myself convulsively forward and that two-pound hammer came arching over my shoulder and flew straight for Carreras’ face with all the power, all the hatred and viciousness that was in me.

He saw it coming. His left hand, still gripping the torch, as raised high to smash down on the unprotected nape of Susan’s neck. He jerked his head sideways, sung out his left arm in instinctive reaction: the hammer caught him just below the left elbow with tremendous force; his torch went flying through the air, and the hold was plunged into absolute darkness. Where the hammer went I don’t know; a heavy rate screeched and rumbled across the floor just at that moment and I never heard it land.

The crate ground to a standstill. In the sudden momentary silence I could hear the sound of struggling, of heavy breathing. I was slow in getting to my feet; my left leg was practically useless, but maybe it only seemed slow to me. Fear, then it is strong enough, has the curious effect of slowing up time. And I was afraid. I was afraid for Susan. Carreras, except as the source of menace to her, didn’t exist for me at the moment. Only Susan: he was a big man, a powerful man; He could break her neck with a single wrench, kill her with a single blow.

I heard her cry out, a cry of shock or fear. A moment’s silence, a heavy soft thump as of falling bodies, a scream of agony, again from Susan, and then that silence again.

They weren’t there. When I reached the spot where they had been struggling, they weren’t there. For a second I stood still in that impenetrable darkness, bewildered, then my hand touched the top of the three-foot baffle and I had it: in their wrestling on that crazily careening deck they’d staggered against the baffle and toppled over on to the floor of the hold. I was over that baffle before I had time to think, before I knew what I was doing; the bo’sun’s knife was in my hand, the needle-pointed marlinespike open, the locking shackle closed.

I stumbled as the weight came on my left leg, fell to my knees, touched someone’s head and hair. Long hair. Susan. I moved away and had just reached my feet again when he came at me. He came at me. He didn’t back away, try to keep out of my reach in that darkness. He came at me. That meant he’d lost his gun.

We fell to the floor together, clawing, clubbing, kicking. Once, twice, half a dozen times he caught me on the chest, the side of the body, with sledgehammer, short-arm jabs that threatened to break my ribs. But I didn’t really feel them. He was a strong man, tremendously strong, but even with all his great strength, even had his left arm not been paralysed and useless, he would have found no escape that night.

I grunted with the numbing shock of it and Carreras shrieked out in agony as the hilt of Macdonald’s knife jarred solidly home against his breastbone. I wrenched the knife free and struck again. And again. And again. After the fourth blow he didn’t cry out any more.

Carreras died hard. He’d stopped hitting me now; his right arm was locked round my neck, and with every blow he struck the throttling pressure of the arm increased. All the convulsive strength of a man dying in agony was brought zero bear on exactly that spot where I had been so heavily and bagged. Pain, crippling pain, red-hot barbed lances of shot through my back and head; I thought my neck was going to break. I struck again. And then the knife fell from my hand.

When I came to, the blood was pounding dizzily in my arms, my head felt as if it were going to burst, my lungs were heaving and gasping for air that wouldn’t come. I felt as if were choking, being slowly and surely suffocated. And then I suddenly realised the truth. I was being suffocated; the arm of the dead man, by some freak of muscular contraction, was still locked around my neck. I couldn’t have been out for long, not for more than a minute. With both hands I grasped his arm by the wrist and managed to tear it free from my neck. For thirty seconds, perhaps longer, I lay there, stretched out on the floor of the hold, my heart pounding, gasping for breath as waves of weakness and dizziness washed over me, while some faraway insistent voice, as desperately urgent as it was distant, kept saying in this remote corner of my mind, you must get up, you must get up. And then I had it. I was lying on the floor of the hold and those huge crates were still sliding and crashing around with every heave and stagger of the Campari. And Susan. She was lying there too.

I pushed myself to my knees, fumbled around in my pocket. I found Marston’s pencil flash, and switched it on. It still worked. The beam fell on Carreras and I’d only time to notice that the whole shirt front was soaked with blood I involuntarily turned the torch away, sick and nauseed.

Susan was lying close in to the baffle, half on her side, half on her back. Her eyes were open, dull and glazed with shock and pain, but they were open.

“It’s finished.” I could hardly recognise the voice as mine. “It’s all over now.” She nodded and tried to smile. “You can’t stay here,” I went on. “The other side of the baffle- quick.” I rose to my feet, caught her under the arms, and lifted. She came easily, lightly, then cried out in agony and went limp on me. But I had her before she could fall, braced myself against the ladder, lifted her over the baffle, and laid her down gently on the other side. In the beam of my torch she lay there on her side, her arms outflung. The left arm, between wrist and elbow, was twisted at an impossible angle. Broken, no doubt of it. Broken. When she and Carreras had toppled over the baffle she must have been underneath: her left arm had taken the combined strain of their falling bodies and the strain had been too much. But there was nothing I could do about it. Not now. I turned my attention to Tony Carreras.

I couldn’t leave him there. I knew I couldn’t leave him there. When Miguel Carreras found out that his son was missing he’d have the Campari searched from end to end. I had to get rid of him, but I couldn’t get rid of him in that hold. There was only one place where I could finally, completely and without any fear of rediscovery, put the body of Tony Carreras. In the sea.

Tony Carreras must have weighed at least two hundred pounds; that narrow vertical steel ladder was at least thirty feet high; I was weak from loss of blood and sheer physical exhaustion and I’d only one sound leg, so I never stopped to think about it. If I had, the impossibility of what I had to do would have defeated me even before I had begun.

I hauled him to the ladder, dragged him up to a sitting position against it, hooked my hands under his shoulders and jerked up his dead weight, inch by inch, until his shoulders and hanging head were on a level with my own, stooped quickly, caught him in a fireman’s lift, and started climbing.

For the first time that night the pitching, corkscrewing Campari was my friend. When the ship plunged into a trough, rolling to starboard at the same time, the ladder would incline away from me as much as fifteen degrees and I’d take a couple of quick steps, hang on grimly as the Campari rolled back and the ladder swung out above me, wait for the return roll, and then repeat the process. Twice Carreras all but slipped from my shoulder; twice I had to take a quick step down to renew my purchase. I hardly used my left leg at all; my right leg and both arms took all the strain. Above all, my shoulders took the strain. I felt at times as if the muscles would tear, but it wasn’t any worse than the pain in my leg, so I kept on going. I kept going till I reached the top. Another half-dozen rungs and I would have had to let him drop for I don’t think I could ever have made it.

I heaved him over the hatch coaming, followed, sank down on deck, and waited till my pulse rate dropped down to the low hundreds. After the stench of oil and the close stuffiness of that hold the driving gale-borne rain felt and tasted wonderful. I cupped the torch in my hand — not that there was more than a very remote chance of anyone being round at that hour, in that weather — and went through his pockets till I found a key tagged “sick bay.” then I caught him by the collar and started for the side of the ship.

A minute later I was down in the bottom of the hold again. I found Tony Carreras’ gun, stuck it in my pocket, and looked at Susan. She was still unconscious, which was the best way to be if I had to carry her up that ladder, and I had. With a broken arm she couldn’t have made it alone, and if I waited till she regained consciousness she would be in agony all the way. And she wouldn’t have remained conscious long. After coping with Carreras’ dead weight, the task of getting Susan Beresford up on deck seemed almost easy. I laid her carefully on the rain-washed deck, replaced the battens, and tied the tarpaulin back in place. I was just finishing when I sensed rather than heard her stir.

“Don’t move,” I said quickly. On the upper deck again I had to raise my voice almost to a shout to make myself heard against the bedlam of the storm. “Your forearm’s broken.”

“Yes.” Matter-fact, far too matter-of-fact. “Tony Carreras? Did you leave…”

“That’s all over. I told you that was all.”

“where is he?”

“Overboard.”

“Overboard?” The tremor was back in her voice and I liked it much better than the abnormal calmness. “How did he…”

“I stabbed him God knows how many times,” I said wearily. “Do you think he got up all by himself, climbed the ladder, and jumped sorry, Susan. I shouldn’t well, I’m not quite my normal, I guess. Come on. Time old doc Marston saw that arm.”

I made her cradle the broken forearm in her right hand, helped her to her feet, and caught her by the good arm to help steady her on that heaving deck. The blind leading the blind.

When we reached the forward break of the well deck I made her sit in the comparative shelter there while I went into the bo’sun’s store.

It took me only seconds to find what I wanted: two coils of nylon rope which I stuck into a canvas bag, and a short length of thicker Manilla. I closed the door, left the bag beside Susan, and staggered across the sliding, treacherous decks to the port side and tied the Manilla to one of the guardrail stanchions. I considered knotting the rope, then decided against it. Macdonald, whose idea this was, had been confident that no one, in this wild weather, would notice so small a thing as a knot round the base of a stanchion, and even if it were noticed, Carreras’ men would not be seamen enough to investigate and pull it in; but anyone peering over the side and seeing the knots might have become very curious indeed. I made the knot round that stanchion very secure indeed, for there was going to depend on it the life of someone who mattered very much to myself. Ten minutes later we were back outside the sick bay. I need not have worried about that sentry. Head bent low over his chest, he was still far away in another world and showed no signs of leaving it. I wondered how he would feel when he came to.

Would he suspect he had been drugged would he put any unusual symptoms down to a combination of exhaustion and seasickness? I decided I was worrying about nothing; one sure guess I could make, and that was that when the sentry awoke he would tell no one about his sleep. Miguel Carreras struck me as the kind of man who might have a very short way indeed with sentries who slept on duty. I took out the key I’d found on Tony Carreras and unlocked the door. Marston was at his desk; the bo’sun and Bullen were both sitting up in bed. This was the first time I’d seen Bullen conscious since he’d been shot. He was pale and haggard and obviously in considerable pain, but he didn’t look as if he were on his last legs. It took a lot to kill off a man like Bullen.

He gave me a long look that was pretty close to a glare. “Well, mister, where the hell have you been?” Normally, with those words, it would have come out like a rasp, but his lung wound had softened his rasp to a hoarse whisper. If I’d had the strength to grin, I’d have done just that, but I didn’t have the strength; there was hope for the old man yet.

“A minute, sir. Dr. Marston, Miss Beresford has a…”

“I can see, I can see. How in the world did you manage?” Close to us now, he broke off and peered at me with his shortsighted eyes. “I would say, John, that you’re in the more immediate need of attention.”

“Me? I’m all right.”

“Oh, you are, are you?” He took Susan by her good arm and led her into the dispensary. He said, over his shoulder, “Seen yourself in a mirror recently?”

I looked in a mirror. I could see his point. Balenciagas weren’t blood-proof. The whole of the left side of my head, face, and neck was covered in blood that had soaked through hood and mask, matted in thick, dark blood that even the rain hadn’t been able to remove: the rain, if anything, had made it look worse than it really was. It must all have come from Tony Carreras’ bloodstained shirt when I’d carried him up the ladder of number four hold. “It’ll wash off,” I said to Bullen and the bo’sun. “It’s not mine. That’s from Tony Carreras.”

“Carreras?” Bullen stared at me, then looked at Macdonald. In spite of the evidence in front of his eyes, you could see that he thought I’d gone off my rocker. “What do you mean?”

“I mean what I say. Tony Carreras.” I sat heavily on a chair and gazed down vacantly at my soaking clothes. Maybe Captain Bullen wasn’t so far wrong: I felt an insane desire to laugh. I knew it was a climbing hysteria that came from weakness, from over-exhaustion, from mounting fever, from expending too much emotion in too short a time, and I had to make a physical effort to fight it down. “I killed him tonight down in number four hold.”

“You’re mad,” Bullen said flatly. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Don’t I?” I looked at him, then away again. “Ask Susan Beresford.”

“Mr. Carter’s telling the truth, sir,” Macdonald said quietly. “My knife, sir? Did you bring it back?”

I nodded, rose wearily, hobbled across to Macdonald’s bed, and handed him the knife. I’d had no chance to clean it. The bo’sun said nothing, just handed it to Bullen, who stared down at it for long, unspeaking moments. “I’m sorry, my boy,” he said at length. His voice was husky.

“Damnably sorry. But we’ve been worried to death.”

I grinned faintly. It was an effort even to do that. “So was I, sir, so was I.”

“All in your own good time,” Bullen said encouragingly. “I think Mr. Carter should tell us later, sir,” Macdonald suggested. “He’s got to clean himself up, get those wet clothes off and into bed. If anyone comes…”

“Right, bo’sun, right.” You could see that even so little talk was exhausting him. “Better hurry, my boy.”

“Yes.” I looked vaguely at the bag I’d brought with me. “I’ve got the ropes there, Archie.”

“Let me have them, sir.” He took the bag, pulled out the two coils of rope, pulled the pillow from his lower pillowcase, stuffed the ropes inside, and placed them under his top pillow. “Good a place as any, sir. If they really start searching, they’re bound to find it anyway. Now if you’d just be dropping this pillow and bag out the window…”

“I did that, stripped, washed, dried myself as best I could, and climbed into bed, just as Marston came into the bay.

“She’ll be all right, John. Simple fracture. All wrapped up and in her blankets and she’ll be asleep in a minute. Sedatives, you know.”

I nodded. “You did a good job to-night, doctor. Boy outside is still asleep and I hardly felt a thing in my leg.” it was only half a lie and there was no point in hurting his feelings unnecessarily. I glanced down at my leg. “The splints…”

“I’ll fix them right away.” He fixed them, not more than half killing me in the process, and while he was doing so I told them what had happened. Or part of what had happened. I told them the encounter with Tony Carreras was the result of an attempt I’d made to spike the gun on the afterdeck; with old Bullen talking away non-stop in his sleep, any mention of the twister would not have been clever at all.

At the end of it all, after a heavy silence, Bullen said hopelessly, “It’s finished. It’s all finished. All that work and suffering for nothing. All for nothing.”

It wasn’t finished; it wasn’t going to be finished ever. Not till either Miguel Carreras or myself was finished. If I were a betting man I’d have staked the last cent of my fortune on Carreras.

I didn’t say that to them. I told them instead of the simple plan I had in mind, an unlikely plan concerned with taking over the bridge at gun point. But it wasn’t half as hopeless and desperate as the plan I really had in mind. The one I’d tell Archie Macdonald about later. Again I couldn’t tell the old man, for again the chances were heavy that he would have betrayed it in his half-delirious muttering under sedation. I hadn’t even liked to mention Tony Carreras, but the blood had to be explained away.

When I finished, Bullen said in his hoarse whisper, “I’m still the captain of the ship. I will not permit it. Good god, mister, look at the weather, look at your condition. I will not allow you to throw your life away. I cannot permit it.”

“Thank you, sir. I know what you mean. But you have to permit it. You must. Because if you don’t…”

“What if someone comes into the sick bay when you’re not here?” he asked helplessly. He’d accepted the inevitable.

“This.” I produced a gun and tossed it to the bo’sun. “This was Tony Carreras’. There are still seven shots in the magazine.”

“Thank you, sir,” Macdonald said quietly. “I’ll be very careful with those shots.”

“But yourself, man?” Bullen demanded huskily. “How about yourself?”

“Give me back that knife, Archie,” I said.