The Dark Crusader

CHAPTER TEN

I slept for two hours. When I awoke the sun was high in the sky and Dr. Hargreaves, the hypersonics specialist, was shaking me gently by the shoulder. At least he thought he was shaking me gently, it was probably the fact that I had a blanket drawn over me that caused him to forget that he shouldn't have been shaking me by the left shoulder. I told him to be more careful, he looked hurt, maybe it was the way I said it, and then I pushed back the blanket and sat up. I felt stiff and sore practically everywhere, my shoulder and arm throbbed savagely, but much of the tiredness was gone and my head was clear again. Which, of course, was what LeClerc had wanted, you can't have a man fusing and wiring up the complicated circuitry on a propellant with the disruptive potential of a hundred tons of high explosive if he's peering, fumbling and staggering around with exhaustion like a drunken man. From time to time I have cherished my share of illusions but one which I didn't cherish was that LeClerc had finished with me.

Hargreaves looked pale and distressed and unhappy. I didn't wonder. His re-union with his wife couldn't have been a very happy one, the circumstances hadn't been very favourable and the immediate prospects even less so. I wondered what they had done with Marie, whether they had put her in with the other women, and when I asked him he said they had.

I looked around the tiny hut. It was no more than eight by eight, with racks along the walls and a tiny steel-meshed window above my head. I seemed to remember vaguely that someone had mentioned that it used to be the small arms and ammunition storage shed, but I couldn't be sure, I'd just dropped on to the canvas cot they'd brought in and gone to sleep instantly. I looked at Hargreaves again.

"What's been going on? Since this morning, I mean?"

"Questions," he said tiredly. "Questions all the time. They interviewed my colleagues, myself and the naval officers separately, then they split-us up and separated us from our wives. We're all over the place now, two or three to a hut."

LeClerc's psychology was easy to understand. With the scientists and naval officers broken into tiny groups, agreement on a concerted plan of resistance or revolt would be impossible: and with the scientists separated from their wives and in a consequent and continuous state of fear and anxiety over their welfare, their cooperation with LeClerc would be absolute.

"What did he want to see you about?" I asked.

"Lots of things." He hesitated and looked away. "Mainly about the rocket, how much did any of us know about the fusing. At least that's what he asked me. I can't speak for the others."

"Do you-do any of them know anything about it?"

"Only the general principles. Each one of us knows the general principles of the various components. We have to. But that doesn't even begin to be enough when it comes to the complex particulars." He smiled wanly. "Any of us could probably blow the whole thing to kingdom come."

"There's a chance of that?"

"No one has ever given a guarantee on an experimental rocket."

"Hence the blockhouse-that sunken concrete shelter to the north?"

"The test firing was to have been carried out from there. Just a first-time precaution. It's also why they placed the scientists' quonset so far away from the hangar."

"The sailors are expendable, but not the scientists? Is that it?" He didn't answer, so I went on: "Have you any idea where they're intending to take this rocket, the scientists and their wives. The naval officers and ratings, of course, won't be taken anywhere."

"What do you mean?"

"You know damn well what I mean. They're of no further use to LeClerc and will be eliminated." He shook his head in what was more an involuntary shudder than a shake and buried his face in his hands. "Did LeClerc make no mention of his ultimate destination?"

He shook his head again and turned away. He seemed badly upset about something, unwilling to meet my eye, but I couldn't find it in my heart to blame him.

"Russia, perhaps?"

"Not Russia." He stared at the floor. "Wherever it is, it's not Russia. They wouldn't look at this old steam-engine affair."

"They wouldn't-" It was my turn to stare. "I thought this was the most advanced-"

"In the Western world, yes. But in the last few months it's been an open secret among our scientists, but one they're all frightened to talk about, that Russia has developed-or is developing-the ultimate rocket. The photon rocket. Hints dropped by Professor Stanyukovich, the leading Soviet expert on the dynamics of gases, don't leave much room for doubt, I'm afraid. Somehow or other they've discovered the secret of harnessing and storing anti-protons. We know about this anti-matter but have no conception of how to store it. But the Russians have. A couple of ounces of it would take the Black Shrike to the moon."

The implications of this were beyond me: but I agreed that it was unlikely that the Soviets would want the rocket. Red China, Japan? The presence of Chinese workers and LeClerc's Sino-Japanese transmitting set seemed to point that way, but the possibility was that those pointers were far too obvious, there were other countries in Asia-and outside Asia-who would dearly love to lay hands on the Black Shrike. But even more important than the question of what nation could or would want such a rocket was the answer to the question how any nation in the world had known that we were building such a rocket. Far back in my mind the first beginnings of an answer were beginning to shape themselves towards an impossible solution… I became gradually aware that Hargreaves was speaking again.

"I want to apologise for my stupidity this morning," he was saying hesitantly. "Damn silly of me to persist in saying you were a solid fuel expert. I might have been putting a rope round your neck. I'm afraid I was too upset to think at all, far less think clearly. But I don't think the guard noticed."

"It's all right. I don't think either that the guard noticed."

"You're not going to cooperate with LeClerc?" Hargreaves asked. His hands were clasping and unclasping all the time, his nerves were no match for his brains. "I know you could do it if you wanted."

"Sure I could. A couple of hours with Fairfield's notes, diagrams, coding symbols and examining the actual layout, and I think I could. But time is on our side, Hargreaves- God knows it's the only thing on our side. As far as LeClerc is concerned, the fusing is the key. He won't leave till he gets the key. London knows I'm here, the 'Neckar' may get suspicious over the delay, anything can happen, and anything that can happen can only be to our advantage." I tried to think of anything that could be to our advantage but failed. "So I sit tight. LeClerc suspects I'm an expert on solid fuels: he cannot possibly know."

"Of course," Hargreaves muttered. "Of course. Time is on our side."

He sat down on an empty ammunition box and stared down silently at the floor. He seemed to have lost all inclination to talk. I didn't much feel like talking myself.

A key turned in the door and LeClerc and Hewell came in. LeClerc said: "Feeling better?"

"What do you want?"

"Just wondering whether you might have changed your mind about your alleged ignorance on the subject of solid fuel."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Of course not. Hewell?" The giant came forward and laid a squat leather-covered box on the floor-a tape recorder. "Perhaps you would care to hear the playback of a recent recording we made?"

I rose slowly to my feet and stared down at Hargreaves. His gaze was still fixed on the floor.

"Thank you, Hargreaves," I said. "Thank you very much indeed."

"I had to do it," he said dully. "LeClerc said he would shoot my wife through the back of the head."

"I'm sorry." I touched him on the shoulder. "It wasn't your fault. What now, LeClerc?"

"It's time you saw the Black Shrikes." He stood to one side to let me pass.

The doors of the hangar were wide open, the lights burning high up near the roof. The rails ran all the way to the back of the hangar.

They were there, all right, the Black Shrikes, stubby pencil-shaped cylinders with highly-polished steel sides and water-cooled porcelain noses above great scalloped air-scoops, the height of a two-storey house and perhaps four feet in diameter. They rested on flat eight-wheeled steel bogies, and on either side of each rocket was a gantry crane, almost as high as the rocket itself, each crane mounted on a four-wheeled bogie: from the top and bottom of the gantries protruding clamps reached out to hold the rockets firmly in position. Both rockets and all four gantries were resting on the same set of rails.

LeClerc wasted no time, no words. He led me straight to the nearest rocket and mounted an open-sided lift fitted to the inner side of the nearest gantry. Hewell jabbed me painfully in the spine with his gun: I got the idea and climbed up beside LeClerc. Hewell stayed where he was. LeClerc pressed a button, an electric motor whined and the lift slid easily upward for about five feet. LeClerc took a key from his pocket, slid it into a tiny hole in the side of the rocket, pulled out a flush-fitting handle and swung out a seven-foot high door in the casing of the Black Shrike: the door had been so meticulously machined, so beautifully fitted, that I hadn't even noticed its existence.

'Take a good look," LeClerc said. "That's all you're here for-to take a good look."

I took a good look. The outer hardened steel casing of the rocket was just that and no more-an outer case. Inside was another casing and the gap between the two was at least five inches.

Directly opposite me, welded on to the inner casing, were two flat steel boxes, about six niches apart and each six inches square. The one to the left, green-painted, bore the legend 'Propellant' and below that the words 'On-Off: the one to the right was a bright pillar-box red in colour, with the words 'Safe' and 'Armed' stencilled in white on the left and right side of the box respectively. On both boxes, just below the top, was a knob-handled switch.

From the foot of both boxes issued flexible armoured cables, with plastic sheathing below the armour-a measure almost certainly designed to protect the underlying electric cables from the tremendous heat which would be generated in flight. The cable to the left, coming from the box marked 'Propellant,' was almost an inch and a half in diameter: the other was half an inch in diameter. The former ran down the inner casing and, about three feet away from the box, split into seven separate cables, each one covered in the same plastic and armour: the latter crossed the gap to the outer casing and disappeared upwards out of sight.

There were two other cables. One, a small half-inch cable, joined the two boxes: the second, two inches in diameter, bridged the gap between the 'Propellant' box and a third box, larger than either of the other two, which was fitted to the inside of the outer wall. This third box had a hinged door facing me, secured by a couple of butterfly nuts: no other electric cables led either to or from it

And that was all that was to be seen. I saw it all in ten seconds. LeClerc looked at me and said: "Got it?" I nodded and said nothing.

"The photographic memory," he murmured cryptically. He closed the door, locked it, pressed the lift button and we hummed upwards again for about six feet. Once more the routine with the key, the opening of a door-much smaller this time, barely two feet in height, the invitation to inspect.

This time there was even less to see. A circular gap in the inner casing, a view beyond the gap of what appeared to be fifteen or twenty round pipes narrowing towards their tips and, in the centre of those pipes, the top of some cylindrical object, about six inches in diameter, which vanished down among the tubes. In the centre of the top of this cylinder was a small hole, less than half an inch across. Attached to the outer casing was an armoured cable of the same dimensions as the one which had issued from the box marked 'Safe' and 'Armed', and it seemed a pretty fair guess that it was the same cable. The end of this cable, which was tipped with a solid copper plug, bent right over and hung slackly downwards in the gap between the outer and inner casings. It seemed logical to suppose that this copper plug was intended to fit into the hole in the central cylinder but here, it would seem, logic would have been in error: the hole in the cylinder was at least four times the size of the narrow copper plug.

LeClerc closed the door, pressed the button, and the lift dropped down to the foot of the gantry. Another door, another key and this time a view of the very base of the rocket, a foot below where the last of the pipes in the inner casing ended. There was no impression of a confusion of pipes here as there had been at the top: everything was mathematically neat and completely' symmetrical, nineteen cylinders all of which seemed to be sealed with a heavy plastic compound, each cylinder about seven inches in diameter, eighteen of them arranged in two concentric circles about an inner core. The cylinders, which completely filled the inner casing, were not entirely smoothsided: at various distances above their lower ends they were smoothly indented in their sides, and those indentations, it was no trick at all to guess, were for the purpose of introducing the leads which hung in an untidy bunch between the two casings. I counted the leads, nineteen in all, breaking out from the seven armoured cables leading from the 'Propellant' box above: a pair of leads from each of three cables, three leads from each of the other three cables and four leads from the remaining cable.

"You have it all, Bentall?" LeClerc asked.

"I have it all," I nodded. It seemed simple enough.

"Good." He closed the door, led the way towards the hangar entrance. "Now to have a look at Fairfield's notebooks, codes and references. At least we were able to save those."

I raised an eyebrow-it was one of the few muscular exercises I could perform without causing myself pain.

"There were some things you couldn't save?"

"The complete set of blue-prints for the rocket. I must confess we did not think that the British would have had the intelligence to take such precautions. They were in the lower half of a sealed metal box-a standard war-tune device, much faster and more foolproof than burning-the top half of which was a glass tank of concentrated hydrochloric with a metal plunger. The plunger was depressed, the glass broken and the acid released before we realised what was happening."

I remembered the captain's bleeding and battered face.

"Good old Captain Griffiths. So now you're completely dependent on having a working model of the rocket, eh?"

"That's so." If LeClerc was worried, he didn't show it. "Don't forget we still have the scientists."

He led me to a hut just beyond the armoury, a hut rather primitively fitted out as an office, with filing cabinets, a typewriter and a plain wooden desk. LeClerc opened the cabinet, pulled out the top drawer and dumped a pile of papers on the table.

"I understand that those are Fairfield's papers, all of them. I'll come back in an hour."

"Two hours at least: probably more."

"I said an hour."

"All right." I rose from the chair where I'd just seated myself and pushed the papers to one side. "Get someone else to work the damn thing out."

He looked at me for a long moment, the slaty milky eyes without expression, then said evenly: "You take very many chances, Bentall."

"Don't talk rubbish." If I couldn't do anything else I could at least sneer at him. "When a man takes chances he can either win or lose. I can't possibly win anything now, and God knows I've nothing to lose."

"You're wrong, you know," he said pleasantly. "There is something you can lose. I can take your life away from you."

"Have it and welcome." I tried to ease the burning pain in my shoulder and arm. "The way I feel right now I'm just about finished with it anyway."

"You have a remarkable sense of humour," he said acidly. Then he was gone, banging the door shut behind him. He didn't forget to turn the key in the lock.

Half an hour passed before I even bothered looking at Fairfield's papers, I'd more important things to think about than those. It was not the most pleasant half-hour of my life. The evidence was all before me now, Bentall with the bunkers off-at last-and I knew the truth, also at last. Counterespionage, I thought bitterly, they should never have let me out of the kindergarten, the wicked world and its wicked ways were far too much for Bentall, if he could put one foot in front of the other without breaking an ankle in the process that was all you could reasonably expect of him. On flat ground, of course. By the time I'd finished thinking, my morale and self-respect had shrunk so much you'd have required an electronic microscope to find them, so I reviewed all that had happened in the hope of discovering one instance where I had been right, but no, I'd a perfect and completely unmarred record, one hundred per cent wrong all along the line. It was a feat that not many people could have matched.

The one redeeming feature about being utterly wrong, of course, was that I'd also been wrong about Marie Hopeman. She had had no special instructions from Colonel Raine, she had never fooled me once. This was no mere hunch or opinion, it was a provable certainty. It was, I knew, rather late in the day to arrive at this knowledge, I couldn't see that it was going to alter anything now, but in different circumstances… I gave myself up to the very pleasant contemplation of what things might have been like in different circumstances and was just finishing off the towers and battlements of a particularly enchanting dream castle in the air when a key turned in the lock. I'd barely time to open the folder and scatter a few papers around before LeClerc and a Chinese guard came in. He glanced down at the table, Malacca cane swinging idly in his hand.

"How is it coming, Bentall?"

"Very difficult and very complicated and continual interruptions by you don't help me any."

"Don't make it too difficult, Bentall. I want this test rocket wired and fused and ready to take off in two and a half hours."

"Your wants are a matter of complete indifference to me," I said nastily. "What's the hurry, anyway?"

"The Navy is waiting, Bentall. We mustn't keep the Navy waiting, must we?"

I thought this one over, then said: "Do you mean to tell me that you have the colossal effrontery to keep in radio touch with the Neckar?"

"Don't be so naive. Of course we're in touch. There's no one more interested than myself to have the Black Shrike land on time, on target. Apart from which, the one sure way to rouse their suspicions and send them steaming back at high speed to Vardu is not to keep in touch with them. So hurry it up."

"I'm doing my best," I said coldly.

When he left, I got down to working out the firing circuits. Apart from the fact that they were coded, the instructions for the wiring were such as could have been carried out by any reasonably competent electrician. What could not have been done by the electrician was the calculation of the settings on the time clock-part of the mechanism in the box attached to the inside of the outer casing-which regulated the ignition of the nineteen propellant cylinders in their proper sequence.

From his notes it appeared that even Fairfield himself had been doubtful about the accuracy of his own recommendations as to firing sequences and times: they had been worked out on a purely theoretical basis, but theory and practise weren't the same things at all. The trouble lay in the nature of the solid fuel propellant itself. A completely stable mixture in limited quantities and at normal temperatures, it became highly unstable under extremes of heat and pressure and beyond a certain unknown critical mass: the trouble was that no one knew the precise limits of any of those factors, nor, even more worrying, did they know how they reacted upon one another. What was known was the highly lethal results of instability: when the safety limit was passed the fuel changed from a relatively slow burning propellant to an instantaneously explosive disruptive estimated, weight for weight, at five times the power of T.N.T.

It was to reduce the danger of mass that the propellant had been fitted in nineteen separate charges and it was to reduce the danger of too suddenly applied pressure that the charges had been arranged to ignite in seven consecutive stages: but, unfortunately, no one could do anything about the danger of heat. The propellant had its own inbuilt oxidising agent, but not nearly enough to ensure complete combustion: two high-speed turbine fans which started up two seconds before the ignition of the first four cylinders supplied air in quantity and under high pressure for the first fifteen seconds until the missile reached a high enough speed to supply itself with sufficient air through its giant air-scoops. But as the Black Shrike was absolutely dependent on its air supply, it meant that it had to leave the earth on a very flat trajectory indeed in order not to run out of atmosphere before the propellant burnt out: it was not until all the fuel was consumed that the missile's automatic brain lifted it sharply out of the atmosphere. But the need for even half a minute's supply of air meant a tremendous air resistance generating extremely high temperatures and while it was hoped that the water-cooled porcelain nose would cope* with part of the heat, no one knew what temperature would be generated in the heart of the rocket. All in all, I thought, it looked like a very dicey deal indeed.

The two switch-boxes I'd seen attached to the inner casing had both to be set before firing-the 'On' switch closed the firing circuits, the 'Armed' switch closed the circuit for the suicide box: if anything went wrong with the rocket in flight, such as a deviation to land or shipping lanes, it could be electronically instructed to commit suicide. In normal missiles fuelled by lox and kerosene, the flight could be stopped simply by sending out a radio message that automatically cut off the fuel supply: but there was no way of shutting off a solid fuel already in combustion. The cylinder I had seen in the middle of the propellant at the top of the rocket had been a sixty pound charge of T.N.T., fitted with a primer, and the hole I had seen in the centre of the primer was to accommodate a 77 grain electrically fired fulminate of mercury detonator, which was connected to the cable I'd seen dangling in the vicinity. The circuit for this was triggered, as were all controls in the rocket, by radio, a certain signal on a certain wavelength activating an electrical circuit in the same box as the one that contained the timing mechanism for the firing circuits: this current passed through a coil which in turn activated a solenoid switch-a soft iron core in the centre of the coil-and this completed the circuit which fired the detonator in the T.N.T. charge. Again Fairfield had been very doubtful of the outcome: what was intended was that the explosion of the T.N.T. should disintegrate the rocket: but it was just as likely, he had thought, that the instantaneous change in heat and pressure would cause the whole rocket to blow up in sympathetic detonation.

If I was picked as the first man to go to the moon, I thought, I'd just as soon not travel on the Black Shrike. Let someone else go first while Bentall remained earthbound and watched for the explosion.

I reached for the typewriter, made a list of which coloured and numbered firing cables marked which fuel cylinders, worked out an average of Fairfield's suggested figures for the timing sequences and stuck the paper in my pocket. I'd just done this when Hewell appeared.

"No, I'm damned well not finished," I said before he could open his mouth. "Why don't you leave me alone to get on with it?"

"How much longer?" he asked in his rumbling gravelly voice. "We're getting impatient, Bentall."

"I'm worried stiff. Maybe fifteen minutes. Leave one of your men outside and I'll knock when I'm finished."

He nodded and left. I got to thinking: some more, mainly about myself and my life expectancy and then I started thinking of the psychologists who speak of the tremendous power of the human mind, the power of positive thinking, and if you say to yourself a thousand times a day to be cheerful and optimistic and healthy, then you will end up that way: I tried it with a slight variation, I tried to see Bentall as a bent old man with silver hair but somehow the positive thinking didn't seem to work in my case, I couldn't see anything of the kind, all I could see was Bentall with a hole in the back of his head. Tonight, it would probably come tonight, but the one certain thing I knew was that it would come. The other scientists could live, but not me: I had to die, and I knew why. I got up and tore the cord from the window blind, but not with the idea of hanging myself before LeClerc and Hewell got round to torturing me to death or shooting me. I rolled the cord into a coil, stuck it in my hip pocket and knocked on the door. I heard the footsteps of the guard walking away.

A few minutes later the door opened again. This time both LeClerc and Hewell were there, accompanied by a couple of Chinese.

"Finished?" LeClerc asked abruptly.

"Finished."

"Right. Start wiring up right away." No thank-you's, no congratulations for Bentall's keen-witted intelligence in solving an abstruse problem. Just get started right away.

I shook my head.

"Not that easy, LeClerc. I must go to the blockhouse first."

"The blockhouse?" The blind-seeming eyes looked at me for a long moment. "Why?"

"You have the launch console there, that's why."

"The launch console?"

"The little box with all the knobs and buttons for remote radio control of the various circuits in the rocket," I explained patiently.

"I know it," he said coldly. "You don't have to examine that before fusing up the rocket."

"You're not the best judge of that," I said loftily.

He'd no option but to give in, which he might have done with better grace. He sent a guard to the captain's office for the keys while we walked in silence across the intervening half-mile, and not a very companionable silence either, but it didn't worry me. I didn't feel like talking, I felt like looking, looking at the white glitter of the sands, the shimmering green-blue of the lagoon, the cloudless blue of the sky above. I took a long long look at all of them, the look of a man who suspects that that look is going to have to last him for a long long time.

The blockhouse had all the strength and solidity of a medieval fortress with the notable difference that it was so deeply sunk in the ground that only the top two feet were visible. There were three radar scanners mounted on the top and three radio aerials and, what I hadn't seen before, the tops of four periscopes which could be tilted on a vertical axis and swung on a horizontal axis.

The entrance was at the back at the foot of a short flight of steps. The door was a massive steel affair mounted on equally massive hinges and must have weighed close on half a ton. It was designed to keep more than the flies out: the possibility of the shock of the equivalent of 100 tons of high explosive detonating just over 1,000 yards away was something that made such a door very essential indeed, even although it was at the back.

The Chinese arrived with two keys, heavy chromed flat-sided jobs like enormous Yale keys." He inserted one, turned it twice and shoved the door slowly open on smooth oiled hinges. He passed inside.

"My God!" I muttered. "What a dungeon." It looked exactly like that. A ten by twenty room, concrete floor, concrete walls, concrete roof, the heavy door through which we'd just come and another only just less heavy door in the opposite wall. And that was all, except for wooden benches round the wall and the tiny glow-worm of a lamp near the ceiling.

Nobody took me up on my conversational gambit. The Chinese crossed the dungeon and opened the other door with.the second key.

This part of the blockhouse was about the same size as the other, but brilliantly lit. One corner of the room, about five by five, was partitioned off with plywood, and it was an easy guess that the idea was to screen radar scopes from the bright light outside. In the other corner was a softly-humming petrol-powered generator with its exhaust pipe disappearing upwards through the roof. There were two tiny ventilators, one high up on either side. And in the middle, between the radar cabin and the generator, was the launch console. I crossed and looked down at it.

It wasn't much, just a sloping metallic box backed by a radio transmitter, with a number of labelled buttons set in a straight line, each button with a tell-tale lamp above it. The first button bore the legend 'Hydraulics' and the second 'Auxiliary'-those would be for the last-minute testing of the oil and electricity circuits: the third said 'Power-Disconnect', that would be for cutting off the battery-feeding external electricity sources: the fourth read 'Flight-Control', a radio signal to alert the guiding mechanism in the Shrike's electronic 'brain'. The fifth, with the legend 'Clamps' would, when pressed, show by lighting up the tell-tale that the gantry clamps supporting the missile were ready for instantaneous withdrawal when the missile took off. The sixth, 'Gantry-Ex', would move back the gantries leaving only the extension arms of the clamps in place: the seventh, the 'Commit' button, started up the power intake fans: two seconds after that, I knew, the revolving clock drum would trigger off the first four of the nineteen cylinders: ten seconds after that, another circuit would close and the suicide circuit would be ready and waiting, waiting only for the moment when something went wrong and the launch console operator pushed the eighth and last button. -

The last button. It was set well away from the other seven. There was no possibility of mistaking it, for it was a square white push set in the middle of a six inch square patch of red and labelled EGADS in steel letters-Electronic Ground Automatic Destruct System: and there was no possibility of triggering it by mistake for it was covered by a heavy wire mesh that had to be unclipped at two sides, and even then the button had to be turned 180° on its axis before it could be depressed.

I gazed at this for some time, fiddled about with the radio behind, took out my notes and consulted them. Hewell loomed over me which would have made it very difficult for me to concentrate if I had had to, which fortunately I hadn't. LeClerc just stood there looking at me with those blind white eyes of his, until one of the guards murmured something to him and pointed in the direction of the back door.

LeClerc left and was back in thirty seconds.

"All right, Bentall," he said curtly. "Hurry it up, will you? The Neckar has just reported that she is running into gale conditions which will make observations of the test impossible when and if the weather deteriorates any further. Seen all you want to?"

"I've seen all I want to."

"You can do it?"

"Sure I can do it"

"How long?"

"Fifteen minutes. Twenty at the most."

"Fifteen?" He paused. "Dr. Fairfield said it would take forty minutes."

"I don't care what Dr. Fairfield said."

"Right. You can start now."

"Start what now?"

"Wiring up the firing circuits, you fool."

"There must be some mistake somewhere," I said. "I never said anything about wiring up those circuits. Can you recall my saying I would. I've no intention of touching the damned circuits."

The gentle swinging of his malacca cane stopped. LeClerc took a step nearer me.

"You won't do it?" His voice was harsh, blurred with anger. "Then what the devil was the idea of wasting the past two and a half hours pretending you were figuring out how to do it?"

"That's it," I said. "That's the whole point of it. Wasting time. You heard what I said to Hargreaves. Time is on our side. You made a recording of it."

I knew it was coming and I saw it coming, but I felt about ninety that day and my reactions were correspondingly slow and the vicious lash of that cane with all LeClerc's fury and weight behind it across my left cheek and eye was a razor-edged sword splitting my face in half. I choked in agony, staggered back a couple of paces, then flung myself at the blurred figure before me. I hadn't recovered a foot when Hewell's two great hands closed over my bad arm and tore it off at the shoulder-later inspection showed it was still there, he must have stuck it back on again-and I swung round lashing out with all the power of my good right arm, but I was blind with agony and missed him completely. Before I could regain my balance one of the guards had me by the right arm and the cane was whistling towards me again. I somehow sensed it was coming, ducked and took the full weight of the blow on the top of my head. The cane swung back for a third blow, but this time it didn't reach me: Hewell released my left arm, jumped forward and caught LeClerc's wrist as it started on its downward swing. LeClerc's arm stopped short as abruptly as if it had come to the limit of a chain attached to the roof. He struggled to free himself, throwing the whole weight of his body on Hewell's hand: neither Hewell nor his hand moved an inch.

"Damn you, Hewell, let me go!" LeClerc's voice was hardly more than a whisper, the trembling whisper of anger out of control. "Take your hand away, I tell you!"

"Stop it, boss." The deep authoritative boom brought normalcy, everyday sanity, back into the blockhouse. "Can't you see the guy's half-dead already. Do you want to kill him? Who's going to fuse up the rocket then?"

There was a few seconds' silence, then LeClerc, in a completely changed tone, said: "Thank you, Hewell. You're quite right, of course. But I had provocation."

"Yeah," Hewell said in his gravelly voice. "You had at that. A clever-clever alec. I'd like to break his goddamned neck, myself."

I wasn't among friends, that was clear enough. But I wasn't worrying about them at that moment, I wasn't even thinking about them, I was too busy worrying and thinking about myself. My left arm and the left side of my face were engaged in a competition to see which could make me jump more and the competition was fierce, but after a while they gave it up and joined forces and the whole left side of my body seemed to merge into one vast agonising pain. I was staring down at the launch console and the various buttons were swimming into focus and out again, one moment gone, the next hopping around like a trayful of jumping beans. Hewell hadn't exaggerated any, if there was one thing that was certain it was that I couldn't take much more of this. I was just slowly coming to pieces. Or perhaps not so slowly.

I heard voices, but whether the voices were directed at me or not I didn't know. I stumbled against a stool and sat down heavily, clinging to the launch console to keep myself from falling.

The voices came again, and this time I could distinguish LeClerc's. He had advanced to within a couple of feet of me, the cane held in both hands, the backs of his thumbs gleaming white as if he were holding himself in check with an effort, as though he were trying to snap the cane in half.

"Do you hear me, Bentall," he said in a low cold voice that I liked even less than his hysterical outburst of a moment ago. "Do you understand what I'm saying to you?"

I stared down at the blood dripping to the concrete floor.

"I want the doctor," I mumbled. My jaws, my mouth were swelling, stiffening up already and I found speech difficult. "My wounds have opened up again."

"The hell with your wounds." The Good Samaritan to the life. "You're going to start on that rocket and you're going to start on it now."

"Ah!" I said. I forced myself to sit straight, and half-shut my eyes until I had him more or less in focus, like an image and six ghosts on a badly-adjusted TV screen. "How are you going to make me? Because you'll have to make me, you know. How? Torture? Bring out the old thumb screws and see if Bentall cares." I was half out of my mind with pain, I didn't know what I was saying. "One turn of the rack and Bentall is in a better world. Besides, I wouldn't feel it anyway. And a hand like mine, trembling like a leaf!" I held it up to let him see it trembling like a leaf. "How do you expect me to fuse a tricky-"

He gave me the back of his hand across my mouth, not lightly.

"Shut up," he said coldly. Florence Nightingale would have loved him, he'd exactly the right touch with sick men. "There are other ways. Remember when I asked that stupid young lieutenant a question and he refused to answer? Remember?"

"Yes." It seemed about a month ago but it had been only a few hours. "I remember. You shot a man through the back of the head. The next time the lieutenant did what you wanted."

"Just like you're going to. I'm having a sailor brought here and I'm going to ask you to fuse that rocket. If you won't, I'll have him shot." He snapped his fingers. "Like that!"

"You will, eh?"

He didn't answer, just summoned and spoke to one of the men. The Chinese nodded, turned away and hadn't gone five steps when I said to LeClerc: "Call him back."

"That's better," LeClerc nodded. "You're going to cooperate?"

"Tell him to bring all the other ratings with him. And all the officers. You can shoot the lot of them through the head. See if I care."

LeClerc stared at me.

"Are you quite mad, Bentall?" he demanded at last. "Don't you realise that I mean what I say?"

"And I mean what I say," I answered tiredly. "You forget what I am, LeClerc. I'm a counter-espionage agent and humanitarian principles don't matter a damn to me. You should know that better than anyone. Besides, I know damn well that you're going to murder them all before you leave here. If they shuffle off twenty-four hours ahead of schedule, then what the hell? Go ahead and waste your ammunition."

He looked at me in silence while the seconds passed, while my heart thudded heavily, painfully in my chest, while the palms of my hands grew moist, then turned away. He believed me all right, it was so exactly the way his own ruthless criminal mind would work. He spoke quietly to Hewell, who left with a guard, then turned back to me.

"Everybody has their Achilles' heel, Bentall," he said conversationally. "I believe you love your wife."

The heat inside that reinforced concrete blockhouse was sweltering, over-hot, but I felt myself turn as cold as if I had just stepped into an ice-box. For a moment all the fierceness of the pain left me and all I could feel were goose-pimples running down my arms and back. My mouth was suddenly dry and I could feel deep in my stomach that hellish incapacitating nausea that can spring only from fear. And I was afraid, afraid with a fear I had not before known: I could feel this fear, I could feel it in my hands, I could taste it in my mouth and the taste was the taste of all the unpleasant things I had ever tasted: I could smell it in the air and the smell was an amalgam of all the evil odours I had ever known. God, I should have known this was coming, I thought of her face twisted in pain, the hazel eyes dark in agony, it was the most obvious thing in the world. Only Bentall could have missed it.

"You poor fool," I said contemptuously. It was hard to get the words past my dry mouth and swollen lips, far less inform them with the appropriately scornful tones, but 1 managed it. "She's not my wife. Her name is Marie Hope-man and I met her for the first time exactly six days ago."

"Not your wife, eh?" He didn't seem vastly surprised. "A fellow-employee of yours, one assumes?"

"One assumes correctly. Miss Hopeman is fully aware of the risks involved. She has been a professional government agent for many years. Don't threaten me with Miss Hopeman or she'll laugh in your face."

"Quite so, quite so. An agent, you say. The British Government is to be congratulated, the level of pulchritude among female agents is apt to be dismally low and Miss Hopeman does much to correct the balance. An astonishingly lovely young lady and one whom I, personally, find quite charming." He paused fractionally. "Since she is not your wife you will not mind so much if she accompanies the other ladies towards our destination?"

He was watching me closely to get my reaction, he didn't have to spell it out for me, but he didn't get the reaction. He had a pistol in his right hand now and what with that and the guard's automatic carbine pointing at my middle, there was nothing to be gained by reacting in the only way I felt like, so I said instead: "Destination? What destination would that be, LeClerc? Asia?"

"That should be obvious, I thought."

"And the rocket? Prototype for a few hundreds more?"

"Exactly." He seemed ready to talk, as all men are ready to talk about their obsessions. "Like many Asiatic nations my adopted country has a genius more, shall we say, for refined imitation than original invention. In six months we shall be turning them out in quantity. Rockets, Bentall, are today's bargaining counters at the table of world politics. We need lebensraum for what the papers of the world are pleased to call our teeming millions. The desert of Australia could be made to blossom like a rose. We should like to move in there, peacefully, if possible."

I stared at him. He'd gone off his rocker.

"Lebensraum? Australia? My God, you're mad. Australia! You couldn't catch up with the military potential of Russia or America in a lifetime."

"By which you mean?"

"Do you think either of those countries would stand by and let you run wild in the Pacific? You are mad."

"They wouldn't," LeClerc said calmly. "I quite agree. But we can deal with Russia and America. The Black Shrike will do it for us. Its great virtues, as you are well aware, are its complete mobility and the fact that it requires no special launching site. We fit out a dozen vessels-not our own, oh dear me no, but flags of convenience, ships from Panama or Liberia or Honduras-with two or three rockets apiece. Three dozen missiles will be enough, more than enough. We dispatch those vessels to the Baltic and the Kamchatka Peninsula, off the Russian coast, and off Alaska and the Eastern seaboard of the United States: those off the Russian coasts will have their rockets zeroed in on ICBM launching sites in America, those off the American coasts zeroed in on the corresponding sites in the USSR. Then they fire, more or less simultaneously. Hydrogen bombs rain down on America and Russia. The advanced radar stations, their long-range infrared scanners, their electronically relayed satellite photographs of intercontinental missile exhaust trails will show beyond dispute that those rocket-borne hydrogen bombs come from Russia and America. Any doubts left in their minds will be resolved by Moscow and Washington receiving radio messages apparently from each other, each calling upon the other to surrender. The two great world powers then proceed to devastate each other. Twenty-four hours later there will be nothing to prevent us from doing exactly as we wish in the world. Or do you see a serious flaw in my reasoning?"

"You're insane." My voice was strained and hoarse even in my own ears. "You're completely insane."

"If we were to do exactly as I have outlined, I would tend to agree with you, although it may come in the last resort. But it would be most foolish, most ill-advised. Apart from the cloud of radioactive dust that would make the northern hemisphere rather unpleasant for some time, we wish to trade with those two rich and powerful nations. No, no, Bentall, the mere threat, the very possibility will be more than enough.

"Both American and Russian observers will be asked to attend highly convincing tests of the Shrike's-we shall probably rename it-power, pay-load, accuracy and range. Then we shall leak the information that those dozen vessels are strategically placed and also leak our intention of triggering off a war in which the two nations will devastate each other. Then we move on Australia.

"Note, then, the extremely interesting and delicate situation that will develop. One or other of the two great powers may move against us. Immediately it does, hydrogen bombs will fall on that country's territory. Say it was America that moved against us. Bombs devastate their 1CBM launching sites, their Strategic Air Command airfields. But where do those bombs come from? Do they come from us, because America has moved against us? Or do they come from Russia, who sees in this the heaven-sent moment to destroy the United States without the possibility of immediate retaliation against it, knowing that the Americans have no proof that the hydrogen bombs came from Russia and assuming that the Americans will think that the bombs really did come from those strategically placed vessels of ours of which they have heard? But note this further: whether America really believed the hydrogen bombs came from us or not they would be forced to launch an all-out assault against the Soviet Union, for the bombs might just as possibly be coming from there and if they are and the Americans wait too long before launching their counter nuclear assault, the United States will be wiped out of existence. The same would happen, even more certainly, if we launched the missiles against Russia. What it comes to in effect, Bentall, is that both the great countries will know that if either of them moves against us, they will be forced to engage in a nuclear holocaust that may destroy them both. Neither of them will move an inch against us: instead they will combine to use their power to stop other countries like Britain or France moving against us. Or, once again, do you see a serious flaw in my reasoning?"

"You're insane," I repeated. "Completely, hopelessly insane." But they were only words, all conviction had left my voice. He didn't look like a man who was insane. He didn't talk like & man who was insane. It was only what he said that sounded insane, but it only sounded insane because it was so preposterous, and it was only preposterous because of the gigantic, the unprecedented scale of the blackmail and bluff involved, of the unparalleled deadliness of the threat that backed up the blackmail. But there was nothing insane about blackmail and bluffs and threats, and if a thing is not insane on a normal scale there is no necessary element of insanity introduced when the normal is multiplied to unimaginable proportions. Maybe he wasn't insane after all.

"We shall see, Bentall, we shall see." He turned as the outer door of the blockhouse opened and quickly switched off all the lights except a small bulb burning above the console.

Marie, with Hewell by her side, came into the semi-darkness. She caught sight of me standing there with my back to the light, smiled, took a step towards me then stopped abruptly as LeClerc lifted his cane to bar her passage.

"Sorry to bring you across, Mrs. Bentall," he said. "Or should it be Miss Hopeman? I understand you are not married."

Marie gave him the sort of look I hoped I'd never see coming my way and said nothing.

"Shy?" LeClerc asked. "Or just uncooperative? Like Ben-tall here. He's refusing to cooperate. He won't agree to fuse the Black Shrike."

"Good for him," Marie said.

"I wonder. He may be sorry. Would you like to persuade him, Miss Hopeman?"

"No."

"No? But we might persuade him through you, if not by you."

"You're wasting your time," she said contemptuously. "I'm afraid you don't know either of us. And we hardly know each other. I'm nothing to him nor is he anything to me."

"I see." He turned to me. "The stiff upper lip, the best traditions of the Secret Service. What do you say, Bentall?"

"The same as Miss Hopeman. You're wasting your time."

"Very well." He shrugged, turned to Hewell. "Take her away."

Marie gave me another smile, clear enough proof that she couldn't see my battered face in the shadow, and left. Her head was high. LeClerc paced up and down, head bent like a man lost in thought, and after a time he gave some order to the guard and left.

Two minutes later the door opened and I saw Marie, with Hewell and LeClerc on either side of her. She had to have them there because she couldn't walk. Her feet trailed on the floor, her head lay far across her left shoulder, and she was moaning softly, her eyes shut. The frightening thing was that she bore no mark of violence, not a hair of her head was out of place.

I tried to get to LeClerc, there were two carbines and Hewell's pistol on me, I never knew they were there, I tried to get to LeClerc to smash his face in, to lash out, to maim, to kill, to destroy, but I couldn't even do that right. On my second step one of the guards tripped me with his carbine and I crashed heavily and full-length on the stone floor. I lay there for some time, dazed.

The guards hauled me to my feet, waiting one on either side of me. Hewell and LeClerc stood as they had done. Marie's head had now fallen forward, so far forward that I could see where the fair hair parted on the nape of the neck. She was no longer moaning.

"Do you fuse the Shrike?" LeClerc asked softly.

"Someday I'll kill you, LeClerc," I said.

"Do you fuse the Shrike?"

"I fuse the Shrike," I nodded. "Then someday I'll kill you."

If I could carry out even half my promise, I thought bitterly, it would be a change for me.