The Dark Crusader

CHAPTER EIGHT

The rain eased and finally stopped altogether, but the night stayed dark. And the sharks stayed away. We made slow time, because I couldn't use my left arm to help me along, but we made time and after almost an hour, when I calculated that we must be at least half a mile beyond the barbed wire fences, we started angling in slowly for shore.

Less than two hundred yards from land I discovered that our change in direction was premature, the high wall of cliff extended further round the south of the island than I had imagined it would. There was nothing for it but to trudge slowly on-by this time 'swimming' would have been a complete and flattering misnomer for our laboured and clumsy movements through the water-and hope that we wouldn't lose our sense of direction in the slight obscuring drizzle that had again begun to fall.

Luck stayed with us and so did our sense of direction, for when the drizzle finally lifted I could see that we were no more than a hundred and fifty yards from a thin ribbon of sand that marked the shore-line. It felt more like a hundred and fifty miles, at least it did to me. I had the vague impression that an undertow was pulling us out into the lagoon all the time, but I knew this couldn't be so, otherwise we would have been swept far out long ago. It was just sheer weakness. But my awareness was not of effort or exhaustion but almost wholly of frustration: the urgency so desperate, the progress so infuriatingly slow.

My feet touched bottom and I staggered upright in less than three feet of water: I swayed and would have fallen had not Marie caught my arm, she was in far better shape than I " was. Side by side we waded slowly ashore and the way I felt no one ever looked less like Venus emerging from the deeps than I did right then. Together we stumbled on to the shore, then, two minds with but one thought, we sat down heavily on the damp sand.

"God, at last!" I gasped. The breath was wheezing in and out of my lungs like air through the sides of a moth-eaten bellows. "I thought we'd never make it."

"Neither did we," a clipped drawling voice agreed. We swung round only to be blinded by the bright white glare from a pair of torches. "You certainly took your time. Please don't try-Good Lord! A female!"

Although biologically accurate enough it struck me as a singularly inept term to describe Marie Hopeman, but I let it pass. Instead I scrambled painfully to my feet and said: "You saw us coming?"

"For the past twenty minutes," he drawled. "We have radar and infra-red that would pick up the head of a shrimp if it stuck itself above water. My word, a woman! What's your name? Are you armed?" The grasshopper mind, a clear cut case for Pelmanism.

"I have a knife," I said tiredly. "Right now I couldn't cut asparagus with it. You can have it if you want." The light was no longer directly in our eyes and I could make out the shape of three figures clad in white, two of them with the vague blurs of guns cradled in their arms. "My name is Bentall. You are a naval officer?"

"Anderson. Sub-Lieutenant Anderson. Where in all the world have you two come from. What is your reason-"

"Look," I interrupted. "Those things can wait. Please take me to your commanding officer, now. It's very important. At once."

"Now just a minute, my friend." The drawl was more pronounced than ever. "You don't seem to realise-"

"At once," I said. "Look, Anderson, you sound like a naval officer who might have a very promising career in front of him but I can promise you that a career stops today, violently, if you don't cooperate fast. Don't be a fool, man. Do you think I'd turn up like this unless there was something most desperately wrong? I'm a British Intelligence agent and so is Miss Hopeman here. How far to your C.O.'s place?"

Maybe he was no fool, or maybe it was the urgency in my voice because, after a moment's hesitation, he said: "The better part of a couple of miles. But there's a telephone at a radar post quarter a mile along that way." He pointed in the direction of the twin barbed wire fences. "If it's really urgent-"

"Send one of your men there, please. Tell your C.O.- what's his name by the way?"

"Captain Griffiths."

'Tell Captain Griffiths that an attempt will almost certainly be made to overpower you and seize your installation very shortly, perhaps in only an hour or two," I said quickly. "Professor Witherspoon and his assistants who worked on the archaeological excavations on the other side of the island have been murdered by criminals who have driven-"

"Murdered!" He came close to me. "Did you say murdered?"

"Let me finish. They've driven this tunnel clear through the island and need breach only a few more feet of limestone to emerge on this side of the island. Where, I don't know, probably about a hundred feet above sea-level. You'll need patrols, patrols to listen for their picks and shovels. They're unlikely to blast their way out."

"Good God."

"I know. How many men have you here?"

"Eighteen civilian, the rest Navy. About fifty all told."

"Armed?"

"Rifles, tommy-guns, about a dozen altogether. Look here, Mr.-ah-Bentall, are you absolutely sure about-I mean, how am I to know?"

"I'm sure. For heaven's sake, man, hurry up."

Another momentary hesitation, then he turned to one of the half-seen men by his side. "Did you get that, Johnston?"

"Yes, sir. Witherspoon and the others dead. Attack expected through tunnel, very soon. Patrols, listening. Yes, sir."

"Right. Off you go." Johnston disappeared at a dead run, and Anderson turned to me. "I suggest we go straight to the Captain. You will forgive me if Leading Seaman Allison walks behind us. You have made an illegal entry into an officially protected area and I can't take chances. Not till I have clear proof of your bona fides."

"Just so long as he keeps his safety catch on I don't care what he does," I said wearily. '1 haven't come all this length just to be shot in the back if your man trips over his own ankles."

We went off in single file, not talking, Anderson with a torch leading the way and Allison with another bringing up the rear. I was feeling dizzy and unwell. The first greyish streaks of dawn were beginning to finger their way upwards from the eastern horizon. After we had gone perhaps three hundred yards, following an ill-defined track that ran first through a scrubby belt of palms and then low bush, I heard an exclamation from the sailor behind me.

He came up close to my back, then called out "Sir!" Anderson stopped, turned. "What is it Allison."

"This man's hurt, sir. Badly hurt, I should say. Look at his left arm."

We all looked at my left arm, no one with more interest than myself. Despite my attempts to favour it as we had been swimming, the exertion seemed to have opened up the major wounds again and my left hand was completely covered with blood that had dripped down my arm. The spreading effect of the intermingled salt water made it seem worse than it actually was, but even so it was more than enough to account for the way I felt.

Sub-Lieutenant Anderson went far up in my estimation. He spent no time on exclamations or sympathies, but said: "Mind if I rip this sleeve off?"

"Go ahead," I said. "But mind you don't rip off the arm at the same time. I don't think there's a great deal holding it in place."

They cut off the sleeve with the aid of Allison's knife and I could see the tightening of Anderson's thin brown intelligent face as he studied the wounds.

"Your friends across at the phosphate camp?"

"That's it. They had a dog."

"This is either infected or gangrenous or both. Either way it's pretty nasty. Lucky for you we have a naval surgeon here. Hold this, miss, will you?" He handed his torch to Marie, pulled off his shirt and tore it into several wide strips, using them to bandage my arm tightly. "Won't do the infection any good, but it should cut down the bleeding. The civilian quonset huts aren't any more than half a mile from here. Think you can make it?" The reserved tone in the voice had vanished. The sight of that left arm had been as good as a character reference from the First Sea Lord.

"I can make it. It's not all that bad." Ten minutes later a long low building with a Nissen type roof loomed up out of the greying dark. Anderson knocked at a door, walked in and touched a switch that lit up a couple of overhead lights.

It was a long bare barn-like structure of a place, with the first third of it given over to a kind of communal living venture while beyond that a narrow central passage bisected two rows of eight by eight cubicles, each with its own door, all of them open to the main roof. In the foreground, brown corticene on the floor, a couple of small tables with writing materials, seven or eight rattan and canvas chairs and that was it. No home from home, but good enough for something that would only be left there to rust and flake away when the Navy was finished with it.

Anderson nodded to a chair and I didn't need any second invitation. He crossed to a small alcove, picked up a phone I hadn't noticed and cranked a naval-type generator. He listened for a few minutes, then hung it back on its rest.

"Damn thing's gone dead," he said irritably. "Always when you need it most. Sorry, Allison, more walking for you. My apologies to Surgeon Lieutenant Brookman. Ask him to bring his kit. Tell him why. And tell the captain we'll be over as soon as possible."

Allison left. I looked at Marie, seated across the table from me, and I smiled back. The first impression of Anderson had been a wrong one, if only they were all as efficient as he was. The temptation to relax, to let go and close the eyes, was temptation indeed: but I'd only to think of those still prisoners in the hands of Witherspoon and Hewell and I didn't feel sleepy any more.

The door of the nearest cubicle on the left opened and a tall skinny youngish man, with prematurely grey hair and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, clad only in a pair of under-shorts, came out into the passage, glasses raised half way up his forehead as he rubbed the sleep out of myopic eyes. He caught sight of Anderson, opened his mouth to speak, caught sight of Marie, dropped his jaw in astonishment, gave a peculiar kind of yelp and hurriedly retreated.

He wasn't the only one who was astonished, compared to my own reactions he was a selling-plater in the jaw-dropping field. I rose slowly to my feet, propping myself up on the table, Bentall giving his incomparable impression of a man who has seen a ghost. I was still giving the impression when the man appeared a few minutes later, dressing-gown flapping about his lanky ankles, and this time the first person he saw was me. He stopped short, peered at me with his head outthrust at the end of a long thin neck, then walked slowly to where I was standing.

"Johnny Bentall?" He reached out to touch my right shoulder, maybe to make sure I was real. "Johnny Bentall!"

I got my jaw closed far enough to speak.

"No other. Bentall it is. I didn't exactly look to find you here, Dr. Hargreaves." The last time I'd seen him had been ' over a year previously, when he'd been the chief of hypersonics in the Hepworth Ordnance establishment.

"And the young lady?" Even in moments of stress Hargreaves had always been the most punctilious of men. "Your wife, Bentall?"

"Off and on," I said. "Marie Hopeman, ex-Mrs. Bentall. I'D explain later. What are you-"

"Your shoulder!" he said sharply. "Your arm. You've hurt it"

I refrained from telling him that I knew all about my arm.

"A dog bit me," I said patiently. It didn't sound right, somehow. "I'll tell you all you want, but, first, one or two things. Quickly, please. It's important. Are you working here, Dr. Hargreaves?"

"Of course I am." He answered the question as if he considered it mildly half-witted and from his point of view I suppose it was. He would be unlikely to be taking a holiday in a naval camp in the South Pacific.

"Doing what?"

"Doing what?" He paused and peered at me through his pebbles. "I'm not quite sure whether I-"

"Mr. Bentall says he is a Government Intelligence officer," Anderson put in quietly. "I believe him."

"Government? Intelligence?" Dr. Hargreaves was in a repetitive mood tonight. He looked at me suspiciously. "You must forgive me if I'm a bit confused, Bentall. What happened to that machine import-export business you inherited from your uncle a year or so ago?"

"Nothing. It never existed. There had to be some cover-up story to account for my departure. I'm betraying official secrets but not really doing any harm in telling you that I was seconded to a Government agency to investigate the leakage of information about the new solid fuels we were working on at the time."

"Um." He thought a bit, then made up his mind. "Solid fuel, eh? That's why we're out here. Testing the stuff. Very secret and all that, you know."

"A new type rocket?"

"Precisely."

"It had to be that. You don't have to take off to the middle of nowhere to carry out experiments on new stuff unless it's either explosives or rockets. And Heaven knows we've reached the limit in explosives without blowing ourselves into space."

By this time other cubicle doors had opened and a variety of sleepy men, in a variety of clothes and underclothes, were peering out to see what the matter was. Anderson went and spoke softly to them, knocked on a couple of other doors, then came back and smiled apologetically.

"Might as well have them all here, Mr. Bentall. If your facts are right it's time they were up anyway: and it'll save you having to tell the same story over again."

"Thanks, Lieutenant." I sat down again and closed grateful fingers over a large glass of whisky that had mysteriously appeared from nowhere. Two or three tentative sips and the room seemed to be floating around me: neither my thoughts nor my eyes were any too keen to be focussed on anything, but after another few sips my vision seemed to clear again and the pain in my arm began to recede. I supposed I was getting lightheaded.

"Well, come on, Bentall," Hargreaves said impatiently. "We're waiting."

I looked up. They were waiting. Seven of them altogether, not counting Anderson-and the late Dr. Fairfield was the missing eighth.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Ill keep it short. But, first, I wonder if any of you gentlemen have any spare clothes. Miss Hopeman here has just recovered from a rather bad chill and fever and I'm afraid-"

This gave me another minute's grace and time for the glass to be emptied and refilled by Anderson. The competition to supply Marie with clothes was brisk. When she'd given me a grateful and rather tired smile and disappeared into one of the cubicles, I told them the story in two minutes, quickly, concisely, missing out nothing but the fact that I'd heard women singing in the abandoned mine. When I'd finished, one of the scientists, a tall florid-faced old bird who looked like an elderly retired butcher and was, in fact, as I later discovered, the country's leading expert in inertial and infrared guidance systems, looked at me coldly and snapped:

"Fantastic, absolutely fantastic. Imminent danger of attack. Bah! I don't believe a word of it."

"What's your theory of what happened to Dr. Fairfield?" I asked.

"My theory?" the retired butcher snapped. "We all know how poor old Fairfield met his dreadful end. No theory. We heard from Witherspoon-Fairfield used to visit him regularly, they were great friends-that they'd been out trolling for trevally-"

"And he'd fallen overboard and the sharks got him, I suppose? The more intelligent the mind the more easily it falls for any old rubbish. I'd sooner rely on the babes in the wood than a scientist outside the four walls of his lab." Dale Carnegie wouldn't have approved of any part of this. "I can prove it, gentlemen, but only by giving you bad news. Your wives «re being held prisoner in the mine on the other side of the island."

They looked at me, then at each other, then back at me again.

"Have you gone mad, Bentall?" Hargreaves was staring at me through his pebble glasses, his mouth tight.

"It would be better for you if I had. No doubt you gentlemen imagine your wives are still in Sydney or Melbourne or wherever. No doubt you write to them regularly. No doubt you hear from them regularly. No doubt you keep their letters, or some of them. Or am I wrong, gentlemen?"

No one said I was wrong.

"So, if your wives are all writing from different homes, you would expect, by the law of averages, that most of them would use different paper, different pens, different inks, and that the different postmarks on the envelopes would not all be printed in the same colours. As scientists, you will all have respect for the law of averages. I suggest we compare your letters and envelopes. No one wants to read any private correspondence, just to make a superficial comparison of likenesses and differences. Would you like to cooperate? Or"-I glanced at the red-faced man-"are you scared to learn the truth?"

Five minutes later the red-faced man was no longer red-faced, and he had learned the truth. Of the seven envelopes produced, three had been of one brand, two of another and two of a third-enough not to make the incoming mail look suspiciously alike. The postmarks on the envelopes, so beautifully clear-cut as to suggest they had been stolen, not manufactured by unauthorised persons, were all in the same colour. Only two pens, a fountain and a ball-point, had been used for the seven letters and the last point was the final clincher-every letter but one had been written on exactly the same notepaper. They must have thought themselves safe enough there, middle-aged and elderly scientists don't usually show their letters around.

After I'd finished and given the letters back to their owners, they exchanged glances, dazed glances where the lack of understanding was matched only by the increasing fear. They believed me all right now.

"I thought my wife's tone was rather strange in recent letters," Hargreaves said slowly. "She's always been so full of humour and poking fun at scientists and now-"

"I've noticed the same," someone else murmured. "But I put it down to-"

"You can put it down to coercion," I said brutally. "It's not easy to be witty when a gun is pointing at your head. I don't pretend to know how the letters were introduced into your incoming mail, but it would be a simple matter to a mind as brilliant as that of the man who killed Witherspoon. For he is brilliant. Anyway, you can introduce mail into mailbags for a hundred years and no one will ever notice. It's only when you start taking it out that eyebrows begin to lift."

"Fairfield," the red-faced man said stupidly. "It wasn't sharks? We were told-"

"I don't have to draw a diagram to explain what happened to Fairfield, do I?" An ill-mannered interruption on my part and one that made little allowance for their state of shock, but I was feeling pretty low myself. "He knew Witherspoon well-all those archaeologists, amateurs included, know each other-and you say yourselves he visited him often. By boat, I assume. But Fairfield made one trip too many to see his friend, because by the time he made his last trip someone had killed Witherspoon and taken his place. Someone who could imitate Witherspoon well enough to deceive casual contacts. But he wouldn't have deceived Fairfield. So Fairfield had to die. Sharks made a convenient scapegoat- and they don't leave any traces. And so no need to produce a body."

"But-but what does it all mean?" Hargreaves' voice had a shake in it and his hands were clenching and unclenching in involuntary nervousness. "What will they-what are they going to do with our wives?"

"You must give me a minute," I said tiredly. "It's as big a shock for me to find you here as it is for you to find out where your wives are. I think you're safe enough now, and the rocket installation, but I believe your wives to be in deadly danger. There's no good blinking facts, expediency is all that matters to the men we're against and humanity not at all. If you move wrongly, you may never see them again. Let me think, please."

They wandered off reluctantly to complete dressing. I thought, but the first part of my thinking was far from constructive. I thought of that old fox Colonel Raine, and I thought of him with something less.than affection. I supposed that after twenty-five years in the business it was impossible for him to let his right hand know what his left was doing. But, more than that, he had made an extraordinarily accurate assessment of the Bentall character. What there was of it.

I hadn't even bothered to ask the scientists whether they bad been a party to those advertisements in the 'Telegraph'. Obviously, they must have been. The men for this job had been picked long before the advertisements had appeared and the adverts had merely been a device to have them removed from the country without raising any questions, and the fact that their wives had accompanied them had merely lent colour to the belief that they had gone abroad permanently. Obviously, too, as it had been a government project, Raine had known all about it, in fact he was probably the man who had made all the necessary undercover arrangements. I thought of how I had completely swallowed the old Colonel's story and I cursed him for his devious and twisted mind.

But, for Raine, it had been necessary, because, somehow or other-his contacts, his sources of information were legion-he had discovered or strongly suspected that the wives of the men who had gone to Vardu Island were no longer in their Australian homes. He would have come to the conclusion that they were being held captive or hostage. He would have worked out why and come to the same conclusion as I recently had.

But he would never have guessed that they were on Vardu, for it was almost certainly Colonel Raine himself who had worked out with the now murdered Witherspoon the scheme to have Vardu used as a protected area based on archaeological discovery: whether the discoveries were genuine or not was a matter of complete unimportance: old Witherspoon and his associates would have been screened with a toothcomb and the idea of associating any skullduggery with that part of the island would have been fantastic. Vardu would have been the last place Raine would have thought of to look for them: he had just no idea at all where they were.

So he had fed me this yarn about sending me out to find the missing scientists but what he had actually intended was that Marie should find the missing scientists' wives. She would find them, he reasoned, by being seized as they had been and for the same reasons, and all he could hope for was that she or I or both could do something about it: but if he had let me think for a moment that that was what he had in mind he knew I would never have gone along with it. He knew what I thought about throwing women to the wolves. Instead of Marie coming along as local colour for me, I was going as local colour, little better than a stooge, for her. I remembered now what he had said about her being much more experienced than I was, that it might end up with her looking after me, not vice versa, and I felt about six inches tall. I wondered how much of all of this, if any, was known to Marie herself.

At this moment Marie made her appearance. She had dried and combed her hair and fitted into slacks and T-shirt that fitted only where they touched, but they touched in enough places to show that it wasn't the original owner who was inside them. She smiled at me and I smiled back but it was a pretty mechanical sort of effort on my part, the more I thought of it the more I suspected she must have known just how the land lay with Colonel Raine. Maybe neither she nor Raine regarded me as anything other than a lucky amateur, and in this business amateurs weren't trusted. Not even lucky ones. But what hurt was not the lack of trust but the fact that if I were right then she'd fooled me throughout. And if she could fool me about that, then she could fool me about many other things, too. I was tired and weak and the thought was acid in my mind. She was looking at me with the kind of expression on her face with which I'd always dreamed that someone just like Marie would look at me, and I knew it was impossible that I was being fooled. I knew it for all of two seconds, which was all the time it took me to remember that she had survived five years in one of the most hazardous professions in the world simply through an extremely highly-developed gift of fooling everyone all the time.

I was about to ask her some leading questions when Dr. Hargreaves came up to me. The others trailed behind him. They were now all dressed in their day clothes. They were worried stiff, all of them, and they looked it.

"We've been talking, and we've no doubt left in our minds that our wives are captive and in great danger," Hargreaves began without preamble. "Our-our wives are our sole concern at this moment. What do you suggest we do?" He was holding himself well in check, but the tight mouth, the straining tendons of his clasped hands gave him away.

"Damn it all, man!" The elderly butcher had the choler back in his face again. "We rescue them, that's what we do."

"Sure," I agreed. "We rescue them. How?"

"Well-"

"Look, friend, you don't begin to know the score. Let me explain. There are three things we can do. We can let the Chinese break through the tunnel into the open, then a few of us nip smartly in there, go through to the other end, release your wives and then what? Hewell's killers would be loose among the sailors here, and with all due respect to the Navy, it would be wolves among chickens. And after they'd gobbled up the chickens they'd find we were missing and come back to finish us off-and your wives as well: and they might take some time finishing off your wives. Or we can blockade the tunnel exit and prevent them from coming out. We can prevent them for about an hour which is all the time it will take for them to go back and collect your wives and by either using them as shields or putting a gun to their heads force us to lay down our arms."

I paused a moment to let this sink in, but one glance round the tense still faces let me see that it had already sunk. They were looking at me as if they didn't like me very much, but I suppose that it was what I was saying that they really didn't like.

"You said there was a third alternative," Hargreaves pressed me.

"Yes." I rose stiffly to my feet, glanced at Anderson. "Sorry, Lieutenant, can't wait any longer for your M.O. Time enough wasted. There is a third alternative, gentlemen. The only practicable one. As soon as they break through the mountain-side-or as soon as we hear them trying to break through-a party of us, three or four, with sledges and crowbars to force locks and armed in case guards have been left behind to look after your wives, will go round the south of the island by boat, land and hope to get your wives clear before Witherspoon and Hewell get the idea of sending back for your wives to use as hostages. In this day and age I assume the Navy no longer depends on oars and sails. A fast power boat should get us there in fifteen minutes."

"I've no doubt it would," Anderson said unhappily. There was an embarrassed silence, then he went on reluctantly: "The fact is, Mr. Bentall, we haven't got any boats."

"Say that again?"

"No boats. Not even a rowing boat. I'm sorry."

"Look," I said heavily. "I know there have been some pretty drastic cut-backs in naval estimates, but if you'll tell me how a Navy can function without-"

"We did have boats," Anderson interrupted. "Four of them, attached to the light cruiser Neckar which has been anchored in the lagoon off and on for the past three months. The Neckar left two days ago with Rear-Admiral Harrison, who is in overall charge, and Dr. Davies, who has been in charge of the development of the Black Shrike throughout. The work on it-"

"The Black Shrike?"

"The name of the rocket. Not quite in firing readiness yet, but we had an urgent cable from London forty-eight hours ago saying it was essential to complete the work at once and ordering the Neckar to the firing range immediately-about 1,000 miles south-west of here. That's why this particular island was chosen-all open water to the south-east if anything goes wrong with the rocket."

"Well, well," I said heavily. "What a lovely coincidence. A cable all the way from London. All the correct codes, hidden identification figures and telegraphic addresses, I'll bet. It wasn't the fault of your communication and coding boys that they fell for it."

"I'm afraid I don't understand-"

"And why should the Neckar leave if the rocket wasn't in complete readiness?" I interrupted.

"It wasn't much," Hargreaves put in. "Dr. Fairfield had all his part of the job finished before he-ah-disappeared, all that was required was that someone with a knowledge of solid fuels-I admit there aren't many-should complete the wiring up and fusing of the firing circuitry. The cable giving the sailing orders said that a solid fuel expert would arrive on the island today."

I refrained from introducing myself. That cable must have been sent off within hours of Witherspoon's being told that Bentall was spending a wet and uncomfortable night on a reef out in the lagoon. There was no question but that the man was a criminal: but there was equally no question but that he was a criminal genius. I was no criminal, but I was no genius either. We belonged in different leagues-the top and the bottom. I felt the way David would have felt if he had happened across Goliath and discovered that he had left his sling at home. I became vaguely aware that Anderson and the red-faced man, whom he addressed as Farley, were talking together, and then the vagueness vanished, I heard a couple of words that caught and transfixed my attention the way a tarantula in my soup would have done.

"Did I hear someone mention 'Captain Fleck'?" I asked carefully.

"Yes," Anderson nodded. "Fleck. Chap who runs a schooner and transfers all our stores and mail from Kandavu to here. But he's not due again until this afternoon."

It was as well that I had risen to my feet, had I still been sitting in my chair I would probably have fallen out of it. I said stupidly: "Transfers your stores and mail, eh?"

"That's right." It was Farley speaking, his voice impatient. "Australian. Trader, mainly in Government surplus, but he's also on charter to us. Rigorously investigated, security clearance, of course."

"Of course, of course." My mind was occupied with visions of Heck busily transferring mail from one end of the island to the other and then back again. "Does he know what's going on here?"

"Of course not," Anderson said. "All work on the rockets- there are two of them-are carried on under cover. Anyway, does it matter, Mr. Bentall?"

"It doesn't matter." Not any more, it didn't. "I think, Anderson, that we'd better go and consult with your Captain Griffiths. We have little time left. I'm afraid we may have no time left."

I turned to the door and halted as knuckles rapped on the outside of it. Anderson said "Come in" and the door opened. Leading Seaman Allison stood there, blinking in the sudden glare of light."

"The Surgeon-Lieutenant is here, sir."

"Ah, good, good! Come in, Brookman, we-" He broke off and said sharply: "Where's your gun, Allison?"

Allison grunted in agony as something struck him from behind with tremendous force and sent him staggering into the room to crash heavily into Farley. Both men were still reeling, falling together against one of the cubicle walls, when the massive form of Hewell appeared in the doorway. He loomed tall as Everest, the gaunt granitic face empty of all life, the black eyes far back and hidden under the tufted brows-he must have forced Allison to go first to give his own eyes time to become accustomed to the light-and in his huge fist was a gun, a gun fitted with a black cylindrical object screwed on to the barrel. A silencer.

Sub-Lieutenant Anderson made the last mistake of his life. He had a Navy Colt strapped to his waist and the mistake he made was trying to reach for it. I shouted out a warning, tried to reach him to knock his arm down, but he was on my left side and my crippled arm was far too slow.

I had a momentary glimpse of Hewell's face and I knew it was too late. His face was as still and as motionless and as empty of life as ever as he squeezed the trigger. A soft muffled thud, a look of faint surprise in Anderson's eyes as he put both hands to his chest and started toppling slowly backwards. I tried to catch him and break his fall, which was a foolish thing to do, it didn't help either of us, all it did was to wrench my left shoulder violently and there's not much point in hurting yourself trying to cushion the fall of a man who will never feel anything again.