Southtrap

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The celebration banquet that evening was shadowed for me by Wegger's exhibition of bloody-mindedness. I couldn't get the man out of my mind as I sat at the head table in the fine teak-and-maple-panelled saloon facing the guests. There was a full turn-out of passengers — Linn had been right when she said they need something to take their minds off the tragedy of Hold-gate. She had provided it in full measure. There was a gala atmosphere and the place buzzed with animated conversation. Overhead two big brass lamps swung in rhythm with the Quest's long rise and fall.

The saloon, which was unusual in running athwart-ships the whole breadth of the ship, was decorated. Streamers were suspended overhead. Klausen, the cook, had excelled himself and provided a culinary masterpiece. It stood on the heavy carved sideboard at my back — red crayfish pincers clasped fish delicacies of all kinds round a centre-piece consisting of a whole fish about a metre long.

My captain's table formed the crosspiece of a T with the other table. Linn, wearing a severely cut white dress with a cowled collar, sat on my left; next to her were the three weathermen, looking uncomfortable in suits. On my right was McKinley, the master of ceremonies. It would be his function, now that the dinner was heading for its climax fuelled by liberal glasses of Kaapse Vonkel, to call on me to propose Captain Jacobsen's toast. That done, Captain Jacobsen would make his speech. He was in high spirits: Mrs Jacobsen appeared to have let him off the leash. McKinley was chatting up his fancy, the dark-haired Barbara, whom he had managed to seat at the junction of the two tables.

Behind me, to my right, a door led aft to the main lounge and bar, — the forward entrance to the saloon, which I faced, was through a pair of swing-doors whose upper sections were diamonds of coloured glass. Miss Auchinleck sat nearest the swing-doors. She wore a feathery pink wig which made her look like a downgraded punk-rock star.

Linn caught my glance and whispered, 'I think she's almost enjoying not being a penguin.'

For all her apparent amusement, I knew that she was as worried as I was about Wegger. He had not shown up in my cabin as ordered, and I had gone to the bridge ready for anything. When I demanded to know where he was, the helmsman pointed to the bows. Amidst the bursting spray Wegger in oilskins was rigging the lifelines. No one was assisting him. As I watched, a sea came over green and threw him to the limit of his securing rope. It was a kind of crazy do-as-you-dare professionalism which partly defused my anger. Whatever his shortcomings, he was a fine sailor.

I gave the order to reduce speed, left the bridge and Wegger to his task, and came on to the dinner. That didn't mean I was any nearer peace of mind. I still wanted to sort it out with him. Also on my mind was the fact that there had been nothing from Botany Bay at the first scheduled signal hour. Persson remained glued to his post.

McKinley broke in on my thoughts. 'Looks as if everyone's about ready, sir. Shall I go ahead?'

'Carry on, Mr McKinley.'

McKinley stood up, rapped the table with a spoon. The chatter died down.

He was suave, easy. 'Ladies and gentlemen, we now come to the highlight of the evening. As you all know, the occasion is to celebrate the war-time escape by our distinguished guest, Captain Jacobsen, from a German raider in these very waters…'

The passengers couldn't have cared less what they were celebrating. It was a good party, that was all.

'… and I call upon Captain Shotton to propose the toast of our guest of honour…'

I got to my feet, my mind blank. My only resolve was not to make a heavy-handed, tedious speech. Still, it was a party and the captain was expected to rise to the occasion.

I half-turned in the direction of Captain Jacobsen on my right. As I did so a slight movement of the door — almost directly behind Jacobsen — caught my eye. Then the door was quickly pulled shut.

I lifted my glass and gave the traditional Scandinavian toast — 'Skoal!'

That wasn't enough from me; I racked my brains for something else to say. Why not rattle off all the other names I knew for toast in other languages to get a laugh? 'Skoal!' I repeated. 'Slainthe! Good health! Gesundheit! Alia salute!..'

The crowd began to laugh and got to its feet.

I went on, 'Bottoms up! Nazdar! Lyia sos! Kenkeh!'

The passengers started chanting after me, lifting their glasses and thumping the table. Captain Jacobsen looked as if he'd come into a million dollars. Mrs Jacobsen was bobbing with gratification.

He rose to reply. 'My friends — you have made for me a happy occasion out of something which was an unhappy occasion. War is an unhappy thing…'

I had been watching him closely, wondering how his heart would stand up to the strain.

Then I saw the knife stand out in his neck.

It had a scrimshawed handle.

Jacobsen's voice rattled on the last word. His left hand plucked at his neck. Then he pitched forward with a crash of broken glass and crockery.

Wegger materialized inside the doorway behind me. He was at a half-crouch. His left hand was at full stretch. It held the Luger. His right talon, which had hurled the knife, was gripping a grenade. He was snatching at the firing-pin with his teeth.

Simultaneously, the double door at the far end of the saloon burst open. Two men fanned out, one right, the other left. A Scorpion machine-pistol was half-concealed in the huge hams of one. The moment I spotted him I knew this was Reilly's tunnel man. He was as wide as a hatchway and probably the biggest man I have ever seen. Two grenades dangled at his groin like giant misplaced testicles. The other gunman had a frame which looked as if it had been plaited from steel rope ending in a bristly topknot. It would have taken 30 seconds for the crossfire from their automatic weapons to have wiped out the whole company.

I leapt to my feet, wheeling. 'Wegger, you bastard.!'

A frightening, inhuman sound cut the stunned silence. It came from Mrs Jacobsen.

She threw herself at Wegger, who was only a pace or two away.

He must have been expecting it, because he waited until she got up to him. Then he swept the Luger barrel across her eyes and head. The force of the blow threw her against the panelling. She slid to the floor, scrabbling at the woodwork.

'Keep still!' shouted Wegger. 'Keep still, everyone! Everyone keep to their seats!'

Linn started up to help Mrs Jacobsen. Wegger put the Luger on her.

'Linn! Do as he says!' I rapped out.

'She's hurt…!'

'Get back! He's mad!'

She shrank uncertainly back into her chair.

I heard, rather than saw, Miss Auchinleck's protest to the big man at the other end of the table. A whale might as well have attacked a harpoon gun. He struck her in the face with the back of a great paw. She tottered and lay down like a piece of crumpled spun popcorn a child has discarded in the gutter.

Wegger turned the Luger on me. In a flash I knew now where he'd been when he had been missing from the bridge. He'd been laying the hijacking on the line, mustering his bully-boys, whom he must have smuggled aboard in Cape Town. There had been a near-miss in the hold when I had searched the ship, and when I had planned to turn back after hearing of Captain Prestrud's death. The whole operation had been carefully planned. The reason for his puzzling tensions was now as clear as day.

His pistol barrel was trembling. Now was my moment if I were to achieve anything before he steadied down to business.

I snatched up a table knife, ducked behind McKinley, and launched myself at him. The knife went hard against the steel of the gun. The crash of the shot deafened me. A the same moment the saloon was filled with sound as one of the other hijackers opened up with his Scorpion over the heads of the crowd. Ricochets whined and ripped the panelling.

In the split second when my knife struck the Luger, I knew that I had lost. The thrust had been meant for his heart. He had parried it by reflex.

He acted with great speed. I was still coming up to barrel my head in his solar plexus when the clubbed Luger struck at my head. I snicked my head aside. It caught my shoulder instead. It felt as if I had stopped the Quest's bow at full ahead. I dropped to one knee with the agony of it, cringing for the shot.

But Wegger held his fire. He pulled back, panting.

'Ullmann! Bravold!' he shouted. 'Hold it! Hold it! We've got'em!'

There was a thin high hysterical scream as incongruous as Mrs Jacobsen's animal keening. It came from McKinley's Barbara.

'Shut up!' snarled Wegger at McKinley. 'Shut her up, or I will!'

He rounded on me. 'Up!' he ordered. 'Back — over there against the wall! Away from me! All of you here — move! Keep your hands high!'

Smit, the met. Team leader, started to growl something and drag his feet.

'Forget it!' I told him under my breath. 'It's too late. We've lost. Forget it!'

The top table guests lined up against the panelling. The rest of the passengers sat transfixed in their chairs. McKinley was trying to quieten Barbara, who was still sobbing loudly.

'Ullmann!' called Wegger. The huge man moved cautiously round the port side of the saloon towards us, stepping over the pink bundle which was Miss Auchinleck. He kept open a field of fire for himself and Bravold. His skin was blotchy and his hair pale, almost white. His place was behind a harpoon gun. If the harpoon missed, he could always throw the gun.

Wegger jumped on to my chair, watching every move. I think any of the trio wold have shot a mouse had it moved.

The fiery pain in my shoulder shot up into my neck like a tracer bullet.

. 'Wegger!' I managed to say. 'Stop this damn nonsense! You must be crazy…!'

'Stow that crap!' he retorted. 'You'll take orders from me from now on, all of you, d'ye hear!'

'Wegger,' I said, 'I'll see you tried for murder. Ill make sure the law gets you. There are thirty eyewitnesses here.'

He jumped off the chair and took a step towards me.

'Law!' He made it sound as if it should be a four-letter word, and not three. 'Law! Take a look at the law from now on, will you!'

He gestured at Ullmann and Bravold. They were in a position to cut everyone down with a burst.

'So you killed Holdgate too,' I said. 'With the same knife. You've killed two men.'

'Holdgate got in my way,' he said. 'That's why he had to be killed.'

I glanced round the saloon hoping someone would support me in my threats to bring Wegger to justice, but the rest of the room seemed in shock. The faces were unresponsive. Ullmann and Bravold stood like human pillboxes with the barrels of their automatics jutting out from flesh instead of casemates.

Linn said in a wobbly voice to Wegger, 'Doesn't human life mean anything to you?'

The muscles in Wegger's face twitched and tightened as if they had been manipulated by wires from behind. His voice rose.

'Human life meant nothing to them! Nothing, I tell you! My life! My life, do you hear! The three of them — Jacobsen, Torgersen and Prestrud! It meant nothing to them!'

'My father — Torgersen! Jacobsen! You killed them all!'

Wegger continued to shout. 'Yes! I killed them all! The last of the bastards tonight — on the anniversary. They were celebrating what they did to me, d'ye hear! Don't give me that crap about human life! They took my life! They didn't think I'd come back and take theirs!'

'Talk sense, Wegger,' I cut in. 'Nothing can justify what you've done!'

'My father!' went on Linn in a strangled voice. You pistol-whipped him until he died!'

I put my sound arm round her. She didn't sob; the convulsions I felt were dry spasms of shock.

'Listen, Wegger…'

They took my life!' he mouthed. 'What do you know of how it feels to have your life run out, day by day, week by week, month by month, fighting with the birds and the elephant seals for stinking scraps that would make you puke, living on Kerguelen cabbage and birds' eggs, the skuas coming at your eyes all the time!'

'When and where was all this?' I demanded.

'Where else?' he said wildly. 'Prince Edward Island! They called it Dina's Island after they'd seen her lying there — and they left me with her! They sailed away and left me marooned — alone, alone — Jesus! Alone and knowing no one would ever come and rescue me. I got so that I used to sit and talk to her — she lay there on her back looking up at me and smiling and when I tried to kiss her the ice came between us. I wanted to make love to her, but she was cold, she was ice! They left me on Prince Edward and sailed away!'

The realization hit me as I pieced together his story from what I already knew.

'So you were Pinguin's radio operator, Wegger!'

'Of course. I homed her in on the whaling fleet — we took the lot, eleven catchers and two factory ships, without a shot.'

'You led one of the boarding parties — the one which boarded Prestrud's group,' I continued.

He seemed to be reliving the past so intensely that he was almost oblivious of the present.

'I was too confident,' he said. 'I thought the show was over. But Prestrud was a very brave man. I went ahead of the German boarders — I called to Prestrud in Norwegian. They said afterwards I was a quisling. It wasn't so. My mother was German. I was on the Germans' side because it was in my blood.'

'And then?' I asked.

The three of them grabbed me. They knocked me out. They must have had a pre-arranged escape plan. They must have cast off from the factory ship right under Kruder's nose. When I came round, we were miles away. I don't know how long I was out. They were safe, because they hove to. The other two skippers came aboard Prestrud's ship. Torgersen and Jacobsen were for killing me out of hand, but Prestrud said no. Maybe he wanted to turn me in as a prisoner-of-war. They accused him of having a soft heart.' Wegger's voiced cracked. 'Soft heart? Does a man with a soft heart maroon a fellow human on the most god-forsaken island on the face of the earth and leave him there to rot to death? That's what they did, those three, instead of shooting me. They went to Prince Edward. They put me ashore — there, right by the big cave. Eight months! Eight months of living hell! Only the birds and seals and the cold! I didn't believe it when the British cruiser came. She lay off and fired her guns. The sound echoed in the big cave — I thought at first the dead volcano was coming alive again. I went outside and I saw the ship…'

'What was her name, Wegger?'

'Neptune — HMS Neptune, one of the big cruisers from the Cape,' he babbled. 'I can see her still. I just stood and looked and… and…'

He looked as if he would break down any moment. Then he resumed.

'She fired her guns a second time and I lit some kelp I'd dried at the mouth of the cave. She saw my signal. She sent a boat. They were searching the remote islands for U-boat bases, they told me later. When I waded out waist-deep to the boat, the officer said, "What a zombie!" I wasn't human any more. Then he asked, "Any kit, chum: " Kit! Kit — on Prince Edward Island! I just said, "Get me out of here, get me out!" I don't remember much after that. I even forgot my name.'

'You were Rolf Solberg in those days,' I reminded him.

His eyes hardened and he said flatly, 'I changed my name after I came out of prison. They gave me a lifer for killing Torgersen. Twenty-three years behind bars. But it was better than eight months on Prince Edward.'

So I had been right about my first impression of Wegger. There had been a prison-like subservience in his manner which had puzzled me at the time, but which I now understood.

Calculations machine-gunned through my brain. The skippers' first anniversary gathering had been thirty years ago to the day. The actual escape had been in 1941. For Torgersen's murder Wegger had served a term of twenty-three years: that left seven still unaccounted for. If his revenge lust had been as violent as it appeared, why hadn't he gone after Prestrud and Jacobsen immediately on his release from gaol? Why wait until the Quest was ready to sail to Prince Edward? Why…? I looked at Wegger's face. It wasn't the question to ask of a madman with a gun in his hand and two of his strong-arm boys at call with machine-pistols in their paws.

'Is this really happening?' cried Linn. 'Aren't we all in a nightmare?'

Wegger got hold of himself. 'I was in a nightmare, I was being tortured! I sat on a rock at the cave entrance where the killer whales came close in. That's where I carved a handle for the knife. The knife I was going to use on them for what they'd done to me. It was an elephant seal's fang I used. The killer whales gave me the idea for the picture.' He indicated Jacobsen's body. 'I used it, as I said I would.'

'You bastard, Wegger!' I burst out. 'You vicious, murdering bastard!'

That seemed to bring him right back to the present. 'No more of that, Shotton! I'm the captain now!'

'What do you think you're going to do with a ship and a load of passengers into the bargain — kill us all?' I went on. 'How far do you think you'll get when the radio black-out's over? You won't be coming out of prison next time, Wegger.'

That's my problem, isn't it?' he sneered.

Our exchange was interrupted by Persson pushing open the door through which Wegger had burst. When he saw Wegger's Luger on him he stopped dead as if he'd been hit by a bullet.

Then he looked at me and exclaimed, 'Sir!' as if he could not believe what he had seen.

'Watch out, Persson! Don't do anything silly. The ship's been hijacked. These men are killers.'

'Hijacked!'

'You'll report to me from now on,' Wegger said tersely. 'I've taken over. No signals are to be sent without my express permission. Try any funny business and you know what to expect.' He gestured with the pistol.

Persson, however, still addressed me. 'Botany Bay came through on the hour, sir. I could just hear. She's still afloat. Seems the danger…'

'Persson!' snapped Wegger. 'Anything you've got to say, say it tome.'

Persson looked uncomfortably from me to Wegger. I eyed Wegger's face and knew that Botany Bay's crew was doomed. He'd never burden himself with another shipful of potential dangers. He'd simply leave them to die.

'Wegger!' I said. 'She's a windjammer — she's damaged. Quest is her only hope!'

He didn't answer me but said to Persson, 'Get back to the radio shack — direct. No blabbing to any of the crew about this…' he indicated the saloon. 'Understood?'

Persson replied uncertainly. 'Understood — sir. But do I keep touch with the windjammer?'

'Stick to the arrangement — for the present,' replied Wegger. 'Now — get out!'

He went.

'I want you in the day cabin,' Wegger said to me. 'I have something more to say to you.'

'No!' exclaimed Linn. 'I have something to say to you! You killed my father…'

'Keep back!' he ordered as Linn moved towards him. 'Don't tempt me to finish off all the Prestruds!'

I restrained her. 'Linn! Don't!'

I'm not having you shot in secret by this maniac!' she burst out. 'I am the owner of this ship. I've more right than anyone to know what is going on…'

'Ullmann!' ordered Wegger. 'Keep this woman here — by force, if necessary. You, Shotton, march!'

In a flash, Linn sprinted past him through the door which Persson had left open. Ullmann swung the Scorpion but Wegger was blocking his aim.

Then Linn was through. The door crashed shut.

'Move, you!' Wegger jammed the Luger into the small of my back. 'After her! Okay, Ullmann, I'll attend to this. Keep the others here. Move, damn you!'