The Dark Crusader

CHAPTER NINE

Hewell advanced into the room. He didn't even look at the dead man on the floor. He made a gesture with his left hand and two soft-footed Chinese, each with a machine-pistol in his hand, came in through the doorway behind him: they carried their guns as if they knew how to use them.

"Anybody here armed?" Hewell asked in his deep gravelly voice. "Anybody here with arms in this room? If so, tell me now. If I find arms on any man or in any man's room and he hasn't told me, I'll kill him. Any arms here?"

There were no arms there. If any of them had toothpicks and thought Hewell might have considered those as arms, they'd have rushed to get them. Hewell had that effect on people. Also, there was no doubt but that he meant what he said.

"Good." He advanced another step and looked down at me. "You fooled us, Bentall, didn't you? That makes you very clever. Nothing wrong with your foot, was there, Ben-tall? But your arm isn't so good, is it-I suppose the Doberman did that to you before you killed it? And you killed two of my best men, didn't you, Bentall? I'm afraid you will have to pay for that."

There was nothing sinister or menacing about the slow sepulchral voice, but then it didn't have to be, the man's looming presence, the craggy ruin of a face made any further menace completely superfluous. I didn't doubt that I would pay.

"But it will have to wait. Just a little. We can't have you dying on us yet, can we, Bentall?" He spoke a few quick words in a foreign language to the Chinese on his right, a tall sinewy intelligent looking man with a face as still as Hewell's own, then turned back to me. "I have to leave you for a moment-we have the guards by the boundary fence to attend to. The main compound and garrison are already in our hands and all telephone lines to the guardposts cut. I am leaving Hang, here, to look after you. Don't any of you try anything clever with Hang. You might think one man, even with a Tommy-gun, can't hold nine men in a small room, and if any of you think that and try to act on it that's as good a way as any to find out why Hang was the sergeant-major of a machine-gun battalion in Korea." Hewell's thin lips cracked in a humourless smile. "No prizes for guessing what side he was on."

Seconds later, he and the other Chinese were gone. I looked at Marie and she at me: but her face was tired and somehow sad and the small smile she gave me hadn't much behind it. Everybody else was looking at the Chinese guard. He didn't appear to be looking at anybody.

Farley cleared his throat and said conversationally: "I think we could rush him, Bentall. One from each side."

"You rush him," I said. "I'm staying where I am."

"Damn it all, man." His voice was low and desperate. "It may be our last chance."

"We've had our last chance. Your courage is admirable, Farley, which is more than can be said for your intelligence. Don't be a damned idiot."

"But-"

"You heard what Bentall said?" The guard spoke in faultless English, with a heavy American accent. '"Don't be a damned idiot."

Farley subsided in a moment, you could see the swift collapse of the stiffened sinews of his resolution, the draining of the insular arrogance which had led to the bland assumption that the guard could speak no language other than his own.

"You will all sit and cross your legs," the guard went on. "That will be safer-for yourselves. I don't want to kill anyone." He paused, then added as an after-thought: "Except Bentall. You killed two members of my long, tonight, Bentall."

There didn't seem to be any suitable comment on that one, so I let it pass.

"You may smoke if you wish," he continued. "You may talk, but do not talk in whispers."

There was no hurry to take him up on his second offer. There are some situations which make it difficult to choose an agreeable topic of conversation and this seemed to be one of them. Besides, I didn't want to talk, I wanted to think, if I could do it without damaging myself. I tried to figure out how Hewell and company had got through so soon. It had been more or less a certainty, I'd known, that they were going to break through that morning, but it had come hours before I had expected it. Had they made a spot check to see if we were still in bed? Possible, but unlikely: they'd showed no signs of suspicion when we'd seen them after the fire. Or had they found the dead Chinese in the tomb? That was more likely, but even if true it was still damnably hard luck.

I suppose I ought to have been bent double under the weight of bitterness and chagrin but strangely enough it hardly crossed my mind. The game was lost and that was all that was to it: or the game up till now was lost, which seemed to be about the same thing. Or maybe it wasn't. It was as if Marie had read my mind.

"You're still figuring, aren't you, Johnny?" She gave me that smile again, the smile that I'd never seen her give anyone, not even Witherspoon, and ray heart started capering around like a court jester in the middle ages until I reminded it that this was a girl who could fool anyone. "It's like the Colonel said. Sitting in the electric chair, the man's hand on the switch and you're still figuring."

"Sure, I'm figuring," I said sourly. "I'm figuring how long I've got to live."

I saw the quick hurt in her eyes and turned away. Hargreaves was regarding me thoughtfully. He was still scared, but he could still think. And Hargreaves had a good mind.

"You're hardly a goner yet, are you?" he asked. "From what I gather neither your friend Hewell nor this man here would hesitate to kill you. But they don't. Hewell said, 'We can't have you dying on us yet.' And you used to work in the same department as Dr. Fairfield. Could you be the fuel expert that we've been expecting?"

"I suppose I am." There was no point in saying anything else, I hadn't known the bogus Witherspoon half an hour altogether before I'd told him that. I wondered if, anywhere along the line there was a mistake I could have made and hadn't. Looking back, it seemed unlikely. "It's a long story. Some other time."

"Could you do it?"

"Do what?"

"Fuse up the rocket?"

"I wouldn't even know how to go about it," I said untruthfully.

"But you worked with Fairfield," Hargreaves persisted.

"Not on solid fuel."

"But-"

"I don't know a single thing about his latest solid fuel development," I said harshly. And to think I'd thought he had a good mind. Would the damned fool never shut up? Didn't he know the guard was listening? What did he want to do-put a rope round my neck. I could see Marie staring at him, her lips compressed, her hazel eyes very far from friendly. "They've been too damned secret about all this," I finished. "They've sent out the wrong expert."

"Well, that's useful," Hargreaves muttered.

"Isn't it? I never even knew of the existence of this Black Shrike of yours. How about putting me in the picture about it? I'm one of those characters who believe that a man should go on learning till the day he dies: this looks like my last chance to collect some fresh information."

He hesitated, then said slowly: "I'm afraid-"

"You're afraid it's all very top secret," I said impatiently. "Sure it's very secret-but not to anyone on this island. Not any longer."

"I suppose not," Hargreaves said doubtfully. He thought for a moment and then smiled. "You will remember the late and bitterly lamented Blue Streak rocket?"

"Our one and only entrant in the inter-continental ballistic missiles stakes?" I nodded. "Sure I remember it. It could do everything a missile should do, except fly. Everyone felt this was very awkward. Considerable heart-burning when the Government dropped it. Much talk about selling out to the Americans, being absolutely dependent for nuclear defence on the Americans, Britain now a very second-rate power, if you could call her a power at all. I remember. The Government was vastly unpopular."

"Yes. And they didn't deserve any of it. They dropped the entire project because one or two of the better military and scientific minds in Britain-we have one or two-kindly pointed out to them that the Blue Streak was a hundred percent unsuitable for its purpose anyway. It was based on American type models, such as the Atlas I.C.B.M., which takes twenty minutes to count down and get under way from the moment of the first alarm, which is all very well for the Americans: with their DEW-lines and advanced radar stations, their infra-red detectors and spies-in-the-skies to detect exhaust trails of launched I.C.B.M.'s, they're counting on getting a half an hour when some maniac presses the wrong button. All the warning we can expect is four minutes." Hargreaves took off his spectacles, polished them carefully and blinked myopically. "Which means that if the Blue Streak had worked, and if the count-down had started the moment the warning had come through it would still have been wiped out of existence by a five megaton Russian ICBM sixteen minutes before it was due to take off."

"I can count," I said. "You don't have to spell it out for me."

"We had to spell it out for the Ministry of Defence," Hargreaves replied. "Took them three or four years to catch on, which is about par for the military mind. Look at the admirals and their battleships. The other great drawback of the Blue Streak, of course, is that it would have required a huge launching installation, all the ramps, gantries, and blockhouses, the enormous trailers of helium and liquid nitrogen to pump in the kerosene and liquid oxygen under pressure, and, finally, the vast size of the rocket itself. This meant a permanent and fixed installation, and with all those hordes of British and American planes flying over Russian territories, Russian planes flying over American and British territories-and for all I know, British and Americans flying over one another's territories-those locations have become so well known that practically every launching base in the U.S. and Russia has a corresponding ICBM from the other country zeroed in on it.

"What was wanted, then, was a rocket that could be fired instantaneously-and a rocket that was completely mobile, completely portable. This was impossible with any known missile fuel. Certainly not with the kerosene-kerosene, in this day and age! — which along with liquid oxygen still powers most of the American rockets. Certainly, either, not with the liquid hydrogen engines the Americans are working on today, the boiling point of -423 °F. makes them ten times as tricky to handle as anything yet known. And they're far too big."

"They were working on cesium and ion fuels," I said.

"They'll be working on them for a long time to come. They've got a dozen separate firms working on those and you know the old saw about too many cooks. And so the mobile rocket ready for instant firing was impossible with any known propellant-until Hargreaves came up with a brilliantly simple idea for solid fuel, twenty times as powerful as used in the American Minuteman. It's so brilliantly simple," Hargreaves admitted, "that I don't know how it works."

Neither did I. But I'd learnt enough from Fairfield to learn how to make it work. But here and now I never would.

"You're sure it really does work?" I asked.

"We're sure, all right. On a small scale, that is. Dr. Fairfield fitted a twenty-eight pound charge to a specially constructed miniature rocket and fired it from an uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. It took off exactly as Fairfield had predicted, very slowly at first, far more slowly than conventional missiles." Hargreaves smiled reminiscently. "And then it started accelerating. We-the radar scanners- lost it about 60,000 feet. It was still accelerating and doing close on 16,000 miles an hour. Then more experiments, scaled down charges, till he got what he wanted. Then we multiplied the weight of the rocket, fuel, simulated warhead and brain by 400. And that's the Black Shrike."

"Maybe multiplying by 400 brings in some fresh factors."

"That's what we've got to find out. That's why we're here."

"The Americans know about this?"

"No." Hargreaves smiled dreamily. "But we hope they will one day. We hope to supply them with it in a year or two, that's why it's been designed far in excess of our own requirements, designed to carry a two-ton hydrogen bomb six thousand miles in fifteen minutes, reaching a maximum speed of 20,000 miles per hour. Sixteen tons compared to the 200 tons of their own ICBM's. 18 feet high compared to a hundred. Can be carried and fired from any merchant ship, coaster, submarine, train or heavy truck. All that and instant firing." He smiled again, and this time the dreaminess was suffused with a certain complacency. "The Yanks are just going to love the Black Shrike."

I looked at him.

"You're not seriously suggesting that Witherspoon and Hewell are working for the Americans, are you?"

"Working for the-" He pulled the spectacles down his nose and peered at me over the thick horn-rims, eyes wide in myopic astonishment. "What on earth do you mean?"

"I just mean that if they aren't I don't see how the Americans are going to have a chance to look at the Shrike, far less love it."

He looked at me, nodded, looked away and said nothing. It seemed a shame to destroy his scientific enthusiasm.

The dawn was in the sky now, even with the lamps still burning inside the quonset we could see the lightening grey patches where the windows lay. My arm felt as if the Doberman were still clinging to it. I remembered the half-finished glass of whisky on the table, reached up for it and said, "Cheers." No one said cheers back to me but I disregarded their unmannerly attitude and downed it all the same. It didn't do me any good that I could feel. Farley, the infra-red guidance expert, gradually recovered his colour, courage and indignation and carried on a long and bitter monologue, in which the two words 'damnable' and 'outrage' were the recurring theme. He didn't say anything about writing his M.P. Nobody else said anything at all. Nobody looked at the dead man on the floor. I wished that someone would give me some more whisky, or even that I knew where Anderson had found the bottle. It seemed all wrong that I should be thinking more about the bottle than the dead man who'd given me my first drink from it. But then everything was wrong that morning, and besides, the past was past, the future-what remained of it-was to come and, while the whisky might help, nothing was surer than that Anderson would never help anyone again.

Hewell returned at the dawn.

He returned at the dawn and he returned alone, and it didn't need the sight of his blood-stained left forearm to tell me why he had returned alone. The three guards by the wire must have been more watchful and more capable than he had imagined, but they hadn't been capable enough. If Hew-ell was worried by his wound, the death of yet another of his men or the murder of three seamen, he hid his worry well. I looked round the faces of the men in the quonset, faces grey and strained and afraid, and I knew I didn't need to spell out for them what had happened. In different circumstances-in very different circumstances-it would have been funny to watch the play of expression on their faces, the utter disbelief that this could be happening to them struggling with the frightening knowledge that it was indeed happening to them. But right there and then it wasn't any strain at all not to laugh.

Hewell wasn't in a word-wasting mood. He pulled out his gun, gestured to Hang to leave the hut, looked us over without expression and said the single word: "Out".

We went out. Apart from a sprinkling of palms down by the water's edge there weren't any more trees or vegetation on this side of the island than there had been on the other. The central mountain was much steeper on this side, and the great gash that bisected its southward side was well in sight, with one of the spurs running down from the north-east obscuring our view to the west and north.

Hewell didn't give us any time to admire the view. He formed us into a rough column of two, ordered us to clasp our hands above our heads-I paid no attention, I doubt whether I could have done it anyway and he didn't press the matter-and marched us off to the north-west, over the low spur of rock.

Three hundred yards on, just over the first spur-another still lay ahead of us-I noticed about fifty yards away on my right a pile of broken rock, of very recent origin. From my lower elevation I couldn't see what was behind that pile but I didn't have to see to know: it was the exit of the tunnel where Witherspoon and Hewell had broken through in the early hours of the morning. I looked carefully all around me, plotting and remembering its position against every topographical feature I could see until I felt fairly certain that I could find it without trouble even on the darkest night. I marvelled at my incurable penchant for assimilating and storing away information of the most useless character.

Five minutes later we were over the low crest of the second spur and could see the whole of the plain on the west side of the island stretched out in front of us. It was still in the shadow of the mountain, but it was full daylight now and easy to make out every feature.

The plain was bigger than the one to the east, but not much, maybe a mile long from north to south and four hundred yards wide between the sea and the first slopes of the mountain. There wasn't a single tree to be seen. In the south-west corner of the plain a long wide pier stretched far out into the glittering lagoon: at our distance of four or five hundred yards this jetty seemed to be made of concrete but was more likely of coral blocks. At the far end of the pier, mounted on rails, with its supporting legs set very far apart, was a heavy crane of the type I'd seen in graving yards for ship repair work: the entire super-structure and jib-there was no counter-balance-were mounted on a ring of live rollers. This was the crane the phosphate company would have used to load its ships-and it was also the crane that must have formed one of the deciding factors in the Navy's decision to set up its rocket installation on the island. It wasn't often, I thought, that you would find ready-made unloading facilities with a pier and crane that looked as if it might be good for thirty tons in a deserted island in the South Pacific.

Two other much narrower sets of rails ran up the pier. A few years ago, I supposed; one of those would have brought loaded phosphate wagons down to the pierhead while the other took the empty ones away. Today, one could still see one of the original sets of lines as it left the pier curving away to the south, rusted and overgrown, towards the phosphate mine: but the other set had been removed and replaced by new lengths of fresh shining rail that led straight inland for a distance of perhaps two hundred yards. Halfway along its length it passed over a curious circular pad of concrete about twenty-five yards in diameter, and finally ended in front of a hangar-shaped building, about thirty feet high, forty wide and a hundred in length. From where we stood almost directly behind the hangar it was impossible to see either its doors or where the rails ended, but it was a safe guess that the latter went all the way inside. The hangar itself was dazzling, it appeared to have been painted m pure white: but it was covered not in paint but in a painted white canvas, a measure, I supposed, designed to reflect the sun's rays and make work possible inside a building made of corrugated iron.

Some little distance north of this stood what were clearly the living-quarters, a group of haphazardly placed buildings, squat, ugly and obviously prefabricated. Further to the north again, at a distance of almost three-quarters of a mile from the hangar, was what seemed to be a solid square of concrete set into the ground. At that distance it was hard to tell, but it didn't look to be any more than two or three feet high. At least half a dozen tall steel poles rose from this concrete, each pole topped with a meshed scanner or radio antenna, all different in design.

Hang led us straight to the nearest and largest of the prefabricated huts. There were two men outside, Chinese, both with automatic carbines. One of them nodded, and Hang stood aside to let us pass through the open door.

The room beyond was obviously the rating's mess. Fifteen feet wide by forty long, it had three-tiered bunks arranged the full length of both walls, with walls and bunks liberally decorated with pin-ups in every shape and form. Between each pair of vertical trios of bunks was a three part locker. More art. Four mess tables, joined end to end to make one table and scrubbed as snowy white as the floor they stood on, ran the full length of the room. Set in the far wall of the room was a door. The sign above it read: 'P. O's Mess'.

On the benches round the two most distant tables sat about twenty men, petty officers and ratings. Some were fully dressed, others hardly dressed at all. One was slumped across the table, like a man asleep, his head pillowed on his bare forearms, and his forearms and the table below covered with clotted blood. None of the men looked shocked or scared or worried, they just sat there with tight and angry faces. They didn't look the type to scare easily, there were no kids among them, the Navy would have picked its best, its most experienced men for this operation, which probably explained why Hewell and his men, even with the elements of surprise and ambush on their side, had run into trouble.

Four men sat side by side on a bench by the top table. Like the men at the lower tables they had their hands clasped in front of them, resting on the wood. Each man had his epaulettes of rank on his shoulders. The big grey-haired man on the left with the puffed and bleeding mouth, the grey watchful eyes and the four gold bars would be Captain Griffiths. Beside him a thin balding hook-nosed man with three bars spaced by purple, an engineer commander. Next to him a blond young man with red between his two gold bars, that would be Surgeon-Lieutenant Brookman: and finally another lieutenant, a red-haired youngster with bitter eyes and a white compressed line where his mouth should have been.

Five Chinese guards were spaced round the walls of the room. Each carried an automatic carbine. By the head of the first table, smoking a cheroot, with a malacca cane-no gun-in his hand and looking more benign and scholastic than ever, was the man I had known as Professor Wither-spoon. Or so I thought until he turned and looked directly at me and then I saw, even although there was no particular expression on his face, that I could be wrong about the benign part of it. For the first time ever I saw him without the tinted glasses, and I didn't like what I saw: eyes with the lightest pupils I had ever seen, but misted, eyes with the flat dull look of inferior coloured marbles. They were almost the eyes you sometimes see on men who are completely blind.

He glanced at Hewell and said: "Well?"

"Well," Hewell said. Every man in the room, except the red-haired lieutenant, was staring at him. I'd forgotten the impact that the first sight of this moving Neanderthalic mountain could make. "We got them. They were suspicious and waiting,but we got them. I lost one man."

"So." Witherspoon turned to the captain. "That accounts for everyone?"

"You murdering fiends," the grey-haired man whispered. "You fiends! Ten of my men killed."

Witherspoon gave a slight signal with his cane and one of his guards stepped forward and placed his carbine barrel against the back of the neck of the rating next to the one who lay with his head pillowed on his arms.

"That's all," Captain Griffiths said quickly. "I swear that is all."

Witherspoon gave another signal and the man stepped back. I could see the white mark where the gun had been Dressing in the man's neck, the slow droop of the shoulders as he exhaled in a long soundless breath. Hewell nodded at the dead man beside him.

"What happened?"

"I asked this young fool here"-Witherspoon pointed at the red-haired lieutenant-"where all the guns and ammunition were stored. The young fool wouldn't tell me. I had that man there shot. Next time I asked he told me."

Hewell nodded absently as if it were the most right and natural thing in the world to shoot a man if another withheld information, but I wasn't interested in Hewell, I was interested in Witherspoon. The absence of spectacles apart, he hadn't changed externally at all: but for all that the change was complete. The quick bird-like movements, the falsetto affected voice, the repetitive habit of speech had vanished: here now was a calm assured ruthless man, absolute master of himself and all around him, a man who never wasted an action or a word.

"Those the scientists?" Witherspoon went on.

Hewell nodded and Witherspoon waved his cane towards the far end of the room.

"They're in there."

Hewell and a guard started to shepherd the seven men towards the P. O's mess. As they passed by Witherspoon, Farley stopped and stood before him with clenched hands.

"You monster," he said thickly. "You damned-"

Witherspoon didn't seem even to look at him. His malacca cane whistled through the air and Farley screamed in agony and staggered back against the bunks, clutching his face with both hands. Hewell caught him by the collar and sent him staggering and stumbling the length of the room. Witherspoon never even looked at him. I had the vague idea that Witherspoon and I weren't going to get along very well in the near future.

The door at the far end opened, the men were bundled inside and then the door was closed again, but not before we all heard the high-pitched excited disbelieving voices of women.

"So you kept them under wraps while the Navy was doing your work for you," I said slowly to Witherspoon. "Now that you no longer need the Navy but do need the scientists-no doubt to supervise and develop the building of fresh rockets wherever you're going-well, you need the wives too. How else could you make their husbands work for you?"

He turned to face me, the long thin whippy cane swinging gently in his hand. "Who asked you to speak?"

"You hit me with that cane," I said, "and I'll choke out your life with it."

Everything was suddenly peculiarly still. Hewell, on his way back, halted in mid-stride. Everybody, for some reason best known to himself, had stopped breathing. The thunder of a feather falling on the floor would have had them all airborne. Ten seconds, each second about five minutes long, passed. Everyone was still holding his breath. Then Wither-spoon laughed softly and turned to Captain Griffiths^.

"I'm afraid Bentall here is of a rather different calibre from your men and our scientists," he said, as if in explanation. "Bentall is, for instance, an excellent actor: no other man has ever fooled me so long or so successfully. Bentall allows himself to be savaged by wild dogs and never shows a sign. Bentall, with one arm out of commission, meets up with two experienced knife-fighters in a darkened cave and kills them both. He is also, for good measure, highly skilled in burning down houses." He shrugged, almost apologetically. "But, then, of course, it requires a very special man to become a member of Britain's Secret Service."

Another peculiar silence, even more peculiar than the one that had gone before. Everybody was looking at their first Secret Service man, and they couldn't have been unduly impressed. With a drawn haggard face like that of a cadaver and a body that looked even more so, I wouldn't have done at all as a subject for a poster to attract fresh recruits to the service. Not, of course, that they used posters. I wondered how on earth Witherspoon had known. The Chinese guard, Hang, had heard us, of course, but he hadn't yet spoken to Witherspoon.

"You are a government agent, Bentall, aren't you?" Witherspoon asked softly.

"I'm a scientist," I said, just to see how it would go. "A fuel research technician. Liquid fuel," I added pointedly.

A sign that I didn't see and a guard advanced and pressed his gun-barrel against Captain Griffith's neck.

"Counter-espionage," I said.

"Thank you." The guard fell back. "Honest to goodness plain scientists aren't expert in codes, wireless telegraphy and Morse. You appear to be well versed in all of them, don't you, Bentall?"

I looked at Lieutenant Brookman. "I wonder if you would be kind enough to fix up this arm of mine?"

Witherspoon took a long step towards me. His mouth was as white as the knuckles of the hand that held the malacca cane, but his voice was as unperturbed as ever. "When I'm finished. It may interest you to know that within two minutes of my returning home tonight after the fire a message started coming through on our radio transmitter. From a vessel by the name of the Pelican, in which I have a considerable interest."

If it wasn't for the fact that my nervous system seemed to have completely stopped working, I'd probably have jumped a foot. If I'd the strength for any gymnastics like that, which I hadn't. As it was, I didn't move a muscle of my face. The Pelican! That had been the first name I'd seen on that list under the blotter, the copied list that now lay between my sock and the sole of my right foot.

"The Pelican was listening in on a certain frequency," he continued. "It had instructions to do so. You may imagine the radio operator's astonishment when an S.O.S. started coming through on that frequency, a frequency far removed from the distress channels."

I still didn't move any facial muscles, but it called for no will-power this time, the shock of realization was enough, the shock of appreciating the enormity of my blunder. But it wasn't really my fault. I had had no means of knowing that the 46 in the list I had picked up meant that the Pelican and the other ships-probably all the other names were ships' names too-were to begin listening in, to keep a radio watch at forty-six minutes past every hour. And, as nearly as I could remember, I had begun to transmit my first experimental S.O.S., when I was trying to line up the receiver and transmitter, at almost exactly that time and on the pre-set wave-length of Foochow, which just happened to be the transmitting wave-length they were using.

"He was a clever man, this operator," Witherspoon continued. "He lost you, and guessed it was because you had dropped down to the distress frequencies. He found you there and followed you. He heard the name Vardu mentioned twice, and knew something was far wrong. He copied down letter for letter your signal to the Annandale. And then he waited ten minutes and called back."

I was still giving my impression of one of the statues on Easter Island, carved from stone and badly battered. This wasn't the end, this wasn't necessarily the end. But it was the end, I knew it was.

" 'combo ridex london'-the telegraphic address of the chief of your service, wasn't it, Bentall?" he asked. It seemed unlikely that I could convince him that all I had been doing was sending a birthday message to my Aunt Myrtle in Putney, so I nodded. "I guessed so. And I thought it might be rather useful if I sent a message myself. While Hewell-who bad now discovered you were missing-and his men were already pickaxeing away 'what was left of the tunnel, I composed a second message. I had no idea, of course, what your coded message had been, but the one I sent to 'combo ridex london' should meet the case. I sent: 'please disregard PREVIOUS MESSAGE EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL ESSENTIAL YOU DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CONTACT ME FORTY EIGHT hours no time code', and took the liberty of adding your name. Do you think that will meet the case, Bentall?"

I said nothing. There was nothing I could say. I looked round the faces at the table, but no one was looking at me any more, they were almost all staring down at their hands. I glanced in Marie's direction, but even she wasn't looking at me. I'd been born in the wrong time and place, I should have been in Rome two thousand years ago and toppling slowly forward on to my sword. I thought of the nasty big hole a sword would make and then, by association of ideas, of the nasty big holes in my upper left arm, so I said to Wither-spoon: "Would you permit Surgeon-Lieutenant Brookman to fix up my arm now?"

He looked at me long and consideringly, then said quietly: "I could almost regret that life has placed us on opposite sides of the fence. I can well understand why your chief sent you on this mission: you are a highly dangerous man."

"I'm better than that," I said. "I'm a lucky man. I'll carry your coffin yet."

He looked at me for a brief moment, then turned to Brookman. "Fix this man's arm."

"Thank you, Professor Witherspoon," I said politely.

"LeClerc," he said indifferently. "Not Witherspoon. That babbling old idiot has served his purpose."

Brookman made a good job. He opened and cleaned the wounds with something that felt like a wire brush, stitched them up neatly, covered them all with aluminium foil and bandage, fed me a variety of pills then, for good measure, jabbed me a couple of times with a hypodermic syringe. Had I been alone I'd have put any dancing dervish to shame but I felt I'd done damage enough to future Secret Service recruitment so I kept reasonably still. By the time he was finished the room itself was beginning to go into a dancing dervish routine, so I thanked Brookman and without a by-your-leave made shakily for the table and sat down heavily opposite Captain Griffiths. Witherspoon-or LeClerc, as I had to think of him now-sat beside me.

"You feel better, Bentall?"

"I couldn't feel worse. If there's a hell for dogs I hope that damned hound of yours is roasting."

"Quite. Who is the senior scientist among those present, Captain Griffiths?"

"What damnable evil are you up to now?" the grey-haired man demanded.

"I won't repeat the question, Captain Griffiths," LeClerc said mildly. His misted white eyes flickered for a moment in the direction of the dead man collapsed on the table.

"Hargreaves," Griffiths said wearily. He glanced in the direction of the sound of the voices behind the closed doors of the P.O.'s mess. "Must you, LeClerc? He's only just met his wife for the first time in many months. He won't be fit to answer anything. There's not much going on that I don't know. I'm the man in overall charge, you understand, not Hargreaves."

LeClerc considered, then said: "Very well. In what state of readiness is the Black Shrike?"

"Is that all you want to know?"

"That's all."

"The Black Shrike is completely ready in every respect except for the wiring up and fusing of the firing circuitry."

"Why wasn't this done?"

"Because of the disappearance of Dr. Fairfield…" I tried to focus on Captain Griffith's face among the kaleidoscopic whirl of people and furniture and dimly realised that it was only now that Griffiths was beginning to understand why Fairfield had disappeared. He stared at LeClerc for long moments, then whispered huskily: "My God! Of course, of course."

"Yes, of course," LeClerc snapped. "But I didn't mean that. Why was the circuitry and fusing not finished earlier. I understand that the loading of the propellant charge was completed over a month ago."

"How-how in heaven's name do you know that?"

"Answer my question."

"Fairfield feared that the propellant mixture might show inherent instability in very hot weather and regarded that as sufficient risk in itself without the additional risk of fusing it." Griffiths rubbed a sun-tanned hand across his damp and bleeding face. "You should know that no projectile or missile, from a two-pounder to a hydrogen bomb, is ever fused until the last possible moment."

"How long did Fairfield say the fusing would take?"

"I once heard him mention a period of forty minutes."

LeClerc said softly: "You're lying, Captain. I know the great virtue of the Shrike is that it can be fired instantaneously."

"That is so. In time of war or tension it would be permanently fused. But we are as yet not quite certain as to the inherent stability of the propellant."

"Forty minutes?"

"Forty minutes."

LeClerc turned to me. "You heard. Forty minutes."

"I heard bits of it," I mumbled. "I'm not hearing very well."

"You are feeling sick?"

"Sick?" I tried to stare at him in vast surprise, but I couldn't find his face anywhere. "Why should I be feeling sick?"

"You could fuse this, Bentall?"

"I'm a specialist in liquid fuel," I said with difficulty.

"I know differently." I could see his face now, because he'd stuck it within three inches of mine. "You were Fairfield's assistant at the Hepworth Ordnance Branch. You worked on solid fuel. I know."

"You know an awful lot."

"Can you fuse this?" he persisted quietly.

"Whisky," I said. "I need a drink of whisky."

"Oh, my God!" He followed this up with some more language, most of which I fortunately couldn't catch, then called to one of his men. I suppose lie Chinese must have gone to the officers' mess, for a few moments later someone was putting a glass in my hand. I gazed blearily at it, a hefty three fingers in a tumbler, and put it all away in a couple of gulps. When I'd stopped coughing and wiped the tears away from my eyes, I found I could see almost as good as ever. LeClerc touched my arm.

"Well, what's the answer? Can you fuse up the Shrike?"

"I wouldn't even know how to start."

"You're ill," LeClerc said kindly. "You don't know what you're saying. What you need is some sleep."