The Dark Crusader

CHAPTER FIVE

Abject apologies, restoring the patient with what few drops of brandy still remained, splinting and taping my ankle in a surgical dressing took about ten minutes. After that they half-helped, half-carried me back to the guest hut. The side-screens were down but I could see the chinks of light through them. The professor rapped on the door and waited. The door opened.

"Who-who is there?" Marie had thrown some kind of wrap over her shoulders and the light of the kerosene lamp behind her made a shining halo round the soft fair hair.

"Nothing to worry about, Mrs. Bentall," Witherspoon said soothingly. "Your husband's just had a slight accident. Hurt his foot rather, I'm afraid."

"Slight accident!" I yelped. "Hurt his foot. I've broken my bloody ankle." I pushed off the restraining hands, tried to lurch through the door, stumbled, cried out and measured my length on the floor of the guest house. I was getting good at measuring my length on floors, it was far quicker than using a tape. Marie, her voice high-pitched in anxiety, said something I couldn't catch above my own moans and dropped to her knees beside me, but the professor lifted her gently to her feet while Hewell picked me up and placed me on my bed. I weigh close on two hundred, but he lifted and set me down with as little effort as a girl her doll, except perhaps not quite so gently. But those string beds were stronger than they looked and I didn't go through to the floor. I moaned some more and then propped myself up on one elbow, letting them see how a stiff-lipped Englishman suffers in silent agony, wincing and screwing my eyes shut from time to time just in case they didn't get it.

Professor Witherspoon explained, rather haltingly, what had happened-at least, his version of what had happened, a convincing amalgam of jammed combinations, top-heavy safes and sagging floors which made safes unstable-and Marie listened to him in stormy silence. If she was acting, she'd missed out on her profession: the quick breathing, the compressed lips, the slightly flared nostrils, the tightly clenched fists, those I could understand: but to get your face as pale as she did hers you really have to put your heart into it. When he'd finished I really thought she was going to start in on him, she didn't seem the slightest scared or awed by Hewell's towering bulk, but she seemed to control herself and said in an icy voice: "Thank you both very much for bringing my husband home. It was most kind of you. I'm sure it was all an accident. Good-night."

That hardly left the door open for any further conversational gambits and they took themselves off hoping aloud that I would be better the next day. What they were really hoping they kept to themselves and they forgot to say how they expected a broken bone to set overnight. For about ten seconds more Marie stood staring through the door by which they'd left, then whispered: "He's-he's terrifying, isn't he? He's like something left over from the dark ages."

"He's no beauty. Scared?"

"Of course I am." She stood still for some seconds longer, sighed, turned round and came and sat on the edge of my bed. For a long moment she looked down at me, like a person hesitating or making up her mind, then she touched me lightly on the forehead with both cool hands, smoothed her fingertips past my hair and looked down at me, propped up by a hand on either side of my head. She was smiling but there was no amusement in the smile and her hazel eyes were dark with worry.

"I'm sorry for all this," she murmured. "It-it's pretty bad, isn't it, Johnny?" She'd never called me that before.

"Terribly." I reached my hands up, put them round her neck and pulled her down till her face was buried in the pillow. She didn't resist any, recovering from the shock of a first-time close-up of Hewell would always take time or maybe she was just humouring a sick man. She had a cheek like a flower petal and she smelled of the sun and the sea. I put my lips close to her ear and whispered: "Go and check if they've really gone."

She stiffened as if she'd touched a live wire, then pushed herself upright and rose. She went to the door, peered through some interstices in the side screens, then said in a quiet voice: "They're both back in the professor's living room. I can see them lifting the safe into position."

"Put the lights out."

She crossed to the table, turned down the wick, cupped her hands above the top of the glass funnel and blew. The room was plunged into darkness. I swung off the bed, unwound the couple of yards of medical plaster they'd wrapped round splints and ankle, cursing softly as it stuck to the flesh, put the splints to one side, stood up and gave two or three experimental hops on my right foot. I was hopping almost as good as ever, the only pain was on the outside of my big toe which had taken the brunt of the weight of the safe when the sole had bent. I tried it again and it was still O.K. I sat down and began to pull on sock and shoe.

"What on earth are you doing?" Marie asked. The soft concern, I noticed with regret, had gone from her voice.

"Just testing," I said softly. "I think the old foot will carry me around a bit yet."

"But the bone-I thought the bone was broken."

"Just a natural fast healer." I tried the foot inside the shoe and hardly felt a thing. Then I told her what had happened. At the end she said: "I suppose you thought it was clever to fool me?"

I'd become used to a lot of feminine injustice in my life so I let it pass. She was too smart not to see how unfair she was, not, at least, when she'd cooled down. Why she had to cool down I didn't know, but when her temperature dropped she would realise the immense advantage I'd gained by having created the impression that I was completely incapacitated. I heard her moving across the room back to the bed and as she passed me she said quietly: "You told me to count the Chinese going in and out of the long hut."

"Well?"

"There were eighteen."

"Eighteen!" All I'd counted in the mine was eight.

"Eighteen."

"Notice what any of them was carrying when he came out?"

"I didn't see any come out. Not before it was dark."

"Uh-huh. Where's the torch?"

"Under my pillow. Here."

She turned in and shortly I could hear her slow even breathing, but I knew she wasn't asleep. I tore up strips of the plaster and stretched them across the face of the torch until there was only a quarter inch diameter hole left in the middle. Then I took up position by a crack in the side-screens where I could watch the professor's house. Hewell left shortly after eleven o'clock, went to his own house. I saw a light come on, then go out after about ten minutes.

I crossed to the cupboard where the Chinese boy had put our clothes, hunted around with the tiny spotlight of light until I'd found a pair of dark grey flannels and a blue shirt and quickly changed in the darkness. Taking a midnight walk in white shirt and white ducks was something that Colonel Raine wouldn't have approved of at all. Then I went back to Marie's bed and said softly: "You're not sleeping, are you?"

"What do you want?" No warmth in the voice, just none at all.

"Look, Marie, don't be silly. To fool them I had to fool you too when they were there. Don't you see the advantage of being mobile when they think I'm completely immobilised. What did you expect me to do? Stand there at the door supported by Hewell and the prof and sing out cheerily: 'Don't worry about this, dear. I'm only kidding'?"

"I suppose not," she said after a minute. "What did you want? Just to tell me that?"

"As a matter of fact it wasn't that, it was your eyebrows."

"My what?"

"Eyebrows. Your hair is so blonde, the eyebrows so black. Are they real? The colour, I mean?"

"Are you all right?"

"I want to blacken my face. Mascara. I thought you might have-"

"Why didn't you say that in the first place instead of trying to be clever?" Whatever her intelligence said about 'forgive' some other part of her mind was against it. "No mascara. All I have is black shoe polish. Top drawer, right side."

I shuddered at the thought but said thanks and left her. An hour later I left her altogether. I'd made up a rough dummy in my bed, checked every side of the house for interested spectators and left by the back, lifting a corner of the side-screens just sufficiently to squirm under. There were no cries or shouts or shots, Bentall abroad unobserved and mighty glad of it. Against a dark background you couldn't have seen me from five yards although you could have smelled me at ten times the distance down wind. Certain makes of boot polish are like that.

On the first part of my trip, between our house and the professor's, it wouldn't really have mattered whether my foot had been in commission or not. To anyone looking out from Hewell's house or the workers' hut, I would have been silhouetted against the lightness of the sea and the white glimmer of the sands, so I made it on my hands and elbows and knees, heading for the rear of the house, out of sight of all the others.

I passed the corner of the house and rose slowly and soundlessly to my feet, pressing close in against the wall. Three long quiet steps and I was at the back door.

Defeat had come almost before I'd started. Because there had been a hinged wooden door at front I had assumed that there would be the same at the rear: but it was a plaited bamboo screen and as soon as I'd touched it it rustled and clicked with the sound of a hundred distant castanets. I flattened myself against the door, hand clenched round the base of my torch. Five minutes passed; nothing happened, nobody came, and when finally a passing catspaw of wind brushed my face the reeds rustled again, just as they had done before. It took me two minutes to gather up twenty reeds in one hand without making too much racket about it, two seconds to pass through into the house and another two minutes to let those reeds fall one by one into place. The night wasn't all that warm, but I could feel the sweat dripping down my forehead and into my eyes. I wiped it away, hooded my hand over the already tiny hole in the centre of the torch face, slid on the switch with a cautious thumb and started going over the kitchen.

I didn't expect to find anything there that I wouldn't have found in any other kitchen, and I didn't. But I found what I was after, the cutlery drawer. Tommy had a fine selection of carving knives, all of them honed to a razor's edge. I picked a beauty, a 10-inch triangular job, serrated on one side and straight on the other, that tapered from two inches below the hilt to just nothing at all. It had the point of a surgeon's lancet. It was better than nothing. It was a lot better than nothing: if I could find the gap between the ribs not even Hewell would think I was tickling him. I wrapped it carefully in a kitchen cloth and stuck it under my belt.

The inside kitchen door, the one giving on the central passage, was made of wood, to keep the cooking smells from percolating throughout the house, I supposed. It opened inwards on oiled leather hinges. I eased myself through into the passage and stood there listening. I didn't have to listen very hard. The professor was something less than a silent sleeper and the source of the snoring, a room with an opened door about ten feet up the passage on the right, was easy to locate. I had no idea where the Chinese boy slept, I hadn't seen him leaving the house so I assumed that he must be in one of the other rooms and I didn't intend to find out which. He seemed to me like a boy who would sleep very lightly indeed. I hoped the professor's adenoidal orchestration would blanket any noise I might make, but for all that I went up the passage towards the living-room door with all the rush and clatter of a cat stalking a bird across a sunlit lawn.

I made it in safety and closed the door behind me without even a whisper of sound. I didn't waste any time looking around the room, I knew where to look and went straight for the big kneehole desk. If the direction of the burnished copper wire not quite buried in the thatch that had caught my eye when first I'd sat in the rattan chair that morning hadn't been guide enough, my nose would have led me straight there: the pungent smell, however faint, of sulphuric acid is unmistakeable.

Most kneehole desks are lined on either side with a row of drawers, but Professor Witherspoon's was an exception. There was a cupboard on either side and neither of them was locked. There was no reason why they should have been. I opened the left-hand door first and shone the pencil beam of light inside.

The compartment was big, thirty niches high by eighteen wide and perhaps two feet in depth. It was packed with lead acid accumulators and dry batteries. There were ten of the accumulators on an upper shelf, big glass-sided 2.5 volt cells, wired together in series: below were eight Exide 120 volt dry-cell batteries, wired up in parallel. Enough power there to send a signal to the moon, if a man had a radio transmitter.

And the man had a radio transmitter. It was in the locker on the other side. It took up the entire space of the locker. I know a. little of transmitter-receivers, but this metallic grey mass with its score or more of calibrated dials, wave-bands and tuning knobs was quite unknown to me. I peered closely at the maker's name and it read: 'Kuraby-Sankowa Radio Corporation, Osaka and Shanghai'. It didn't mean a thing to me, any more than the jumble of Chinese characters engraved beneath it. The wave-lengths and receiving stations on the transmitting waveband were marked in both Chinese and English and the needle was locked on Foochow. Perhaps Professor Witherspoon was the kind-hearted sort of employer who allowed his homesick workers to speak to their relatives in China. But perhaps he wasn't.

I closed the door softly and turned my attention to the upper part of the desk. The professor might have known I was coming, he hadn't even bothered to pull down the roll-top. After five minutes' methodical search I was beginning to understand why he hadn't bothered, there was nothing in the desk-top drawers and pigeon-holes worth concealing. I was about to give it up and fold my tent when I looked again at the most obvious thing on that desk-the blotting pad with its four-cornered leather holder. I took the blotters out of the holder and looked down at the piece of thin parchment paper that had been concealed between the lowest blotter and the pad.

It was a type-written list of six lines, each line consisting of a double-barrelled name followed by figures, eight figures every time. The first line read: 'Pelican-Takishmaru 20007815', the second: 'Linkiang-Hawetta 10346925' and so on with the other four lines containing equally meaningless names and combinations of figures. Then there was a space of an inch, then another line which read: 'Every hour 46 Tombola'.

I could make nothing of it. It seemed to be about the most useless information-if that's what it was-that anyone could ever want. Or I could be looking at the most important code I'd ever seen. Either way, it didn't seem much help to me. But it might help later. Colonel Raine reckoned I'd a photographic memory, but not for this kind of junk. I took pencil and paper from the professor's desk, copied the writing, put the parchment back where I'd found it, took off my shoe, folded the paper and placed it, wrapped in some waterproof cellophane, between the sole of my foot and my sock. I didn't fancy making that traverse through the passage to the kitchen again, so I left through a window remote from Hewell's and the workers' houses.

Twenty minutes later I was well clear of all the houses and rose painfully to my feet. I hadn't travelled so far on my hands, elbows and knees since my nursery days and I'd lost the hang of the thing: moreover, years of not moving around on them had made mine quite unsuitable for this kind of locomotion and they ached fiercely: but they weren't in any worse condition than the clothes that covered them.

The sky was almost completely overcast, but not quite, and every now and then a sudden unveiling of the almost full moon made me drop quickly into the shelter of some scrub or bush and wait until the sky darkened over again. I was following the line of the railway tracks which led from the crushing mills and drying shed round to the south and then, presumably, west of the island. I was very interested in this line and its destination. Professor Witherspoon had carefully refrained from making any mention of what lay on the other side of the island, but for all his care Professor Witherspoon talked too much. He'd told me that the phosphate company used to take 1,000 tons a day out of the hillside, and as it wasn't there any more they must have taken it away. That meant a ship, a big ship, and no big ship would ever have used that tiny floating pier of logs below the professor's house, even if it could have approached it closely enough in the shallow lagoon water, which it couldn't. Something bigger was needed, something much bigger: a stone or concrete pier, maybe one made from coral blocks, and either a crane or a raised hopper with a canted loading chute. Maybe Professor Witherspoon hadn't wished me to walk in this direction.

A few seconds later I was wishing the same thing myself. I'd just passed over a tiny culvert where a small stream, almost covered in with bushes and thickets, ran down from the mountain to the sea, and had taken no more than ten paces beyond when there came the quick stealthy rush of padding feet behind me, something heavy crashed into my back and shoulder and then, before I'd time to start reacting, something else closed over my upper left arm, just above the elbow, with all the power and brutal savagery of a sprung bear-trap. The immediate pain was agonizing.

Hewell. That was my first and instinctive reaction as I staggered and lurched and all but fell. Hewell, it must be Hewell, no one else I'd ever known could have a grip like that, it felt as if my arm was being crushed in half. I swung round in a vicious half-circle hooking with all the strength of my right arm for where his stomach ought to have been and all I did was make a hole in the night. I almost dislocated my right shoulder but I'd more to think about than that as I lurched sideways again, fighting for my balance. Fighting for my balance and fighting for my life. It wasn't Hewell who had me, but a dog about the size and power of a wolf.

I tried to tear him off with my right hand but all I did was to sink those huge teeth still deeper into my arm. I tried crashing my right fist again and again against that powerful body but he was so far to my left and back that I could barely reach him. I tried kicking, but I couldn't get anywhere near him. I couldn't get at him, I couldn't shake him off, there was no solid object I could crush him against and I knew that if I tried falling on top of him he'd have loosened his grip and had my throat before I knew what he was about.

He must have weighed between eighty and ninety pounds.

He had fangs like steel hooks and when you have steel hooks embedded in your arm and a weight of ninety pounds suspended from them only one thing can happen-the skin and flesh start to tear, and I haven't any different skin or flesh from anyone else. I could feel myself getting weak, I could feel the waves of pain and nausea washing over me when, in a moment of clarity, my mind or what passes for it started working again. I'd no trouble in getting the knife clear of my belt, but it took almost ten interminable and pain-filled seconds before I could free it one-handed from its cloth wrapping. After that it was easy, the stiletto point entered just below the breastbone and angled inwards and upwards for the heart, meeting almost no resistance. The bear-trap grip on my arm loosened in a fraction of a second and the dog was dead before it reached the ground.

I didn't know what kind of dog it was and I didn't care. I hauled him by his heavy studded collar till I came to the culvert I'd so recently crossed, dragged him down the short bank to the stream and pulled him into the water where the bushes were thickest. I thought he would be pretty well screened from sight above but I didn't dare use my torch to see. I jammed him in place with some heavy stones so that no freshet after, heavy rain could wash him into view, then lay face down by the stream for almost five minutes till the sharpest of the pain, the shock and nausea had worn off and my racing pulse and pounding heart returned to something like normal. It had been a bad couple of minutes.

Getting my shirt and singlet off was no pleasure at all, the arm was already stiffening up, but I managed it and washed my arm thoroughly in the running water. I was glad it was fresh water and not salt. Washing my arm, I thought, was going to do me a great deal of good if that dog had been suffering from hydrophobia, about the same effect as if I washed my arm after a king cobra had struck. But there didn't seem to be much point in worrying about it, so I bandaged up my arm as well as I could with strips torn from my singlet, pulled on my shirt, climbed out of the culvert and continued on my way, still following the metal tracks. I carried the knife in my right hand now and I hadn't any cloth wrapped round it either. I felt chilled, cold with the ice-cold of a vicious anger. I wasn't kindly disposed towards anyone.

I was almost round to the south of the island now. There were no trees, just bushes and scattered low shrub that was no good for concealment at all unless you lay prone on the ground, and I wasn't in the mood for lying prone on the ground. But I hadn't altogether taken leave of my senses and when the moon suddenly broke through into a large patch quite free from cloud I dropped flat and peered out from the shelter of some bushes that wouldn't have given decent cover to a rabbit.

In the brilliant wash of the moonlight I could see now that my first impression of the island from the reef that morning hadn't been entirely accurate, the early morning mists had obscured the true features to the south of the island. True, the narrow plain at the foot of the mountain did, from where I lay, seem to go all the way round the island, but it was much narrower here than in the east. Moreover, it didn't slope steadily towards the sea but seemed even to slope from the sea to the base of the mountain: which meant only one thing, that the island to the south must end in a very steep drop to the lagoon, perhaps even a sheer cliff-face. And I hadn't been right about the mountain either, although this new feature I couldn't have seen from the reef: instead of having the continuously smooth steeply sloping surface of a cone, the mountain seemed to be almost completely bisected down its southerly face by a gigantic cleft or ravine, no doubt a relic of that catastrophic day when the northern half of the mountain had vanished into the sea. What this entire physical configuration amounted to was that the only way from east to west on this island appeared to lie across the narrow connecting belt of plain to the south: it couldn't have been more than a hundred and twenty yards wide.

Fifteen minutes later that patch in the clouds was twice as large and the moon still in the middle of it, so I decided to move. In that bright moonlight a move backwards would have been just as conspicuous as a move forwards, so I decided I might as well keep going on. I cursed that moon pretty steadily. I said things about that moon that the poets and the Tin Pan Alley merchants wouldn't have approved of at all. But they would have approved of the unreserved apology I made to the moon only a couple of minutes later.

I had been inching forward on what was left of my elbows and knees, with my head about nine inches above the ground, when suddenly I saw something else about nine inches above the ground and less than a couple of feet from my eyes. It was a wire, strung above the ground on little steel pins with looped heads, and I hadn't seen it further away because it was painted black. The paint, its low height above the ground, the presence of a dog wandering around and the fact that the wire wasn't strung on insulators made it pretty clear that it wasn't an. electric circuit carrying some kind of lethal current. It was an old-fashioned trip wire. It would be connected up with some mechanical warning device.

I waited twenty minutes without moving until the moon had again gone behind the clouds, rose stiffly to my feet, crossed the wire and got down again. The land had now quite a definite dip to my right, towards the base of the mountain, and the railway track had been raised and banked on one side to meet the angle of the ground. It seemed like a good idea to crawl along beneath the raised edge of the embankment: I would be in shadow if the moon broke through again. Or I hoped I would be.

I was. After almost half-an-hour more of this elbow and knees caper, during which I saw nothing and heard nothing and thought with increasingly sympathetic admiration of the lower members of the animal kingdom who were doomed to spend their lives getting around in this fashion, the moon broke through again. And this time I really saw something.

Less than thirty yards ahead of me I saw a fence. I had seen such fences before and they weren't the kind that surround an English meadow. Where I'd seen them before had been in Korea, round prisoner of war cages. This one was a nine-stranded barbed-wire affair, over six feet high and curving outwards at the top: it emerged from the impenetrable darkness of the vertically-walled cleft in the mountain to my right and ran due south across the plain.

Perhaps ten yards beyond that there was another fence, a duplicate of the first, but what occupied my attention was not either of the fences but a group of three men I could see beyond the second fence. They were standing together, talking, I presumed, but so softly that I couldn't hear what they were saying, and one of them had just lit a cigarette. They were dressed in white ducks, round caps, gaiters and cartridge belts, and carried rifles slung over their shoulders. They were, without any doubt at all, seamen of the Royal Navy.

By this time my mind had given up. I was tired. I was exhausted. I couldn't think any more. Given time, I could maybe have thought up a couple of good reasons why I should suddenly on this remote Fijian island stumble across three seamen of the Royal Navy, but that seemed a daft sort of thing to do when all I had to do was stand up and ask them. I transferred the weight from my elbows to the palms of my hands and started to get to my feet.

Three yards ahead of me a bush moved. Shock froze me into involuntary and life-saving immobility, no relic dug out by the professor was ever half so petrified as I was at that moment. The bush leaned over gently towards another bush and murmured something in so low a voice that I couldn't have heard it another five feet away. But surely they must be hearing me. My heart was reverberating in my ears like a riveter's hammer. It was going about the same speed, too. And even if they couldn't hear me they must surely have felt the vibrations being transmitted through my body and ground, I was as near to them as that, a seismograph could have picked me up in Suva. But they heard nothing, they felt nothing. I lowered myself back to the ground like a gambler laying down the last card that's going to lose him his fortune. I made a mental note that all this stuff about oxygen being necessary for life was a tale invented by the doctors. I had completely stopped breathing. My right hand ached, in the moonlight I could see the knuckles of the fist clenched round the hilt of the knife gleaming like burnished ivory. It took a conscious effort of will to relax the grip even slightly, but even so I still clung on to the handle of that knife harder than I'd ever clung on to anything before.

Seven or eight aeons passed. By and by the three naval guards, who had that liberal interpretation of their duties possessed by naval guards the world over, disappeared. At least they seemed to disappear, until I realised that what I had taken for a dark patch in the ground behind them was really a hut. A minute passed, then I heard the metallic clacking and hissing of a primus stove being pumped into life. The bush in front of me moved again. I twisted the knife in my hand until the blade was pointing up, not down, but he didn't come my way. He crawled off silently, parallel to the wire, heading for another bush about thirty yards away, and I could see that other bush stir as he approached. The place was full of moving bushes that night. I changed my mind about asking the guards what they were doing there. Another night, perhaps. Tonight, the wise man went to bed and thought about things. If I could get to my bed without being chewed to pieces by dogs or knifed by one of Hewell's Chinese, I would think about things.

I made it back to the house in one piece. It took me ninety minutes altogether, half of it to cover the first fifty yards, but I made it.

It was coming on for five in the morning when I raised the corner of the seaward screen and slipped into the house. Marie was asleep, and there seemed to be no point in waking her, bad news could wait. I washed off the boot-black in a basin in the corner of the room, but I was too tired to do anything about rebandaging my arm. I was too tired even to think about things. I climbed into bed and have only the faintest recollection of my head touching the pillow. Even if I had had a dozen arms and each one throbbing with pain as was my left, I don't think they would have kept me awake that night.