The Dark Crusader

CHAPTER SEVEN

Some freak in the atmosphere of the cave, possibly a combination of the moisture and the phosphate of lime, had maintained the bodies in a state of almost perfect preservation. Decomposition had set in, but to a negligible extent only, certainly not enough to mar any of the essential features of the nine corpses lying where they had been flung in a rough row at the far end of the cave. The dark stains on white and khaki shirt-fronts made it easy to see how they had died.

Again the ice-chill hand of fear touched the back of my neck. I looked quickly around as if expecting to see the old man with the scythe still waiting patiently in some dark corner of the cave. Waiting for Bentall. Only, there were no dark corners. Nothing, except the round smooth dank walls, the shabby stained bundles on the floor and the battery supplying feeble power to the dim yellow lamp, barely more than head high, that dangled from the centre of the low-vaulted roof.

With my hand to my nose and breathing through my mouth only, I switched on my torch to give extra illumination and scanned the dead faces.

Six of the dead men were complete strangers to me, labourers by the looks of their clothes and hands, and I knew I had never seen them before. But the seventh I recognised immediately. White hair, white moustache, white beard, here was the real Professor Witherspoon: even in death his resemblance to the impostor who had taken his place was startling in its closeness. Beside him lay a giant of a man, a man with red hair and a great red handle-bar moustache: this, beyond any doubt, would be the Dr. 'Red' Carstairs whose portrait I had been shown in a magazine. The ninth man, in a much better state of preservation than the others, I identified without a second glance: his presence there confirmed that the men who had advertised for a second fuel research specialist had indeed been in need of one: it was Dr. Charles Fairfield, my old chief in the Hepworth and Ordnance Fuel Research, one of the eight scientists who had been lured out to Australia.

Sweat was pouring down my face but I was shivering with cold. What was Dr. Fairfield doing there? Why had he been killed? Old Fairfield was the last man to stumble upon anything. A brilliant man in his own field, he was as shortsighted as a dodo and had a monumental incuriosity about everybody and everything except his own work and his consuming private passion for archaeology. And the archaeological tie-up between Fairfield and Witherspoon was so blindingly obvious that it just didn't make any sense at all. Whatever reason lay behind Dr. Fairfield's sudden disappearance from England, nothing was more certain than that it was entirely unconnected with whatever pick and shovel expertise he might show in abandoned mine-workings. But then what in the name of God was he doing here?

I felt as if I were in an ice-box, but the sweat was trickling more heavily than ever down the back of my neck. Still holding the torch in my right hand-the knife was in my left-I worked a handkerchief out of my right trouser pocket and mopped the back of my neck. To the left and front of me I caught a momentary flash of something glittering on the wall of the cave, something metallic, obviously, reflecting the beam of the still burning torch. But what? What metallic object was there? Apart from the dead men the only other objects in that cave were the light fitting and the light switch, and both were made of bakelite. I held the torch and handkerchief, both still over my shoulder, perfectly steady. The glimmer of light on the cave wall was still there. I stood like a statue, my eyes never leaving that gleam on the wall. The light moved.

My heart stopped. The medical profession can say what it likes, but my heart stopped. Then slowly, carefully, I brought down both torch and handkerchief, transferred the torch to my left hand as if to enable me to shove my handkerchief away with my right, then dropped the handkerchief, clutched the hilt of the knife in my right hand and whirled round all in one half second of time.

There were two of them, no more than four feet inside the cave, still fifteen feet distant from me. Two Chinese, already moving wide apart to encircle me, one in dungaree trousers and cotton shirt, the other in a pair of cotton shorts, both big muscular men, both in their bare feet. Their unwinking eyes, the oriental immobility of the yellow faces served only to emphasize, not mask, the cold implacability of the expressions. You didn't have to know your Emily Post to realise that they just weren't paying a social call. Nor would Emily have given them any medals for their calling cards, two of the most lethal-looking double-edged throwing knives I'd ever seen: the books on etiquette covered practically every possible situation in which strangers first made the other's acquaintance, but they'd missed out on this one.

It would be ridiculous to deny that I was frightened, so I won't. I was scared, and badly scared. Two fit men against one semi-invalid, four good arms against one, two undoubtedly skilled and cunning knife-fighters against a man who'd never even carved up a lump of cooked dead meat far less a live human being. And this wasn't the time to learn. But it was the time to do something, and do it very quickly indeed before one or other of them caught on to the idea that at five yards I was a target that could hardly be missed and changed over from a stabbing to a throwing grip on his knife.

I rushed at them, right hand and knife over my shoulder as if I were wielding a club, and both of them fell back an involuntary couple of paces, maybe because of the foolhardy recklessness of it, more likely because of the respectful fear which Orientals habitually show in the presence of madness. I brought the knife whistling forward over my shoulder and with the tinkling of glass from the smashed overhead light and the flick of my left thumb on the torch switch the cave became as pitch-black as the tomb it really was.

It was essential to move, and move as fast as possible before they realised that I had the double advantage of having a torch and being in the position to lash out indiscriminately with my knife in the hundred per cent certainty that I would be stabbing an enemy, whereas they had a fifty per cent chance of stabbing a friend. Reckless of the noise I made in that utterly silent chamber, I pulled away the occluding plaster on the face of the torch, slipped off my sandals, ran three heavy steps in the direction of the entrance, stopped abruptly and sent both sandals sliding along the ground to thud softly against the- wooden door.

Had they been given another ten seconds to take stock of their position, to work out the possibilities, probably the last thing they would have done would have been to rush headlong to the source of the sudden noise. As it was, they had been given barely five seconds altogether in which to think, and the immediate and inevitable reaction must have been that I was trying to escape. I heard the quick patter of bare feet, the sound of a brief scuffle, a soft thud and an explosive gasp of agony that was lost in the clatter of something metallic falling to the floor.

Four swift soundless steps on my stockinged feet, a flick of the left thumb and they were pinned in the white glare of the torch, a tableau vivant but for their unnaturally petrified rigidity which gave them for all the world the appearance of a group sculpted from marble. They stood face to face, their chests almost but not quite touching. The man on my right had his left hand twisted in his companion's shirt front while his right hand was pressed against the other's body, just below waist level: the man on the left, his face averted from me, was arched over backwards like an overstrung bow, both hands locked over the right hand of his companion: the ridged and straining tendons turned the hands into waxen claws, the knuckles gleamed white like polished bone. I could see the blood-stained point of a knife sticking out two inches from the small of his back.

For two seconds, perhaps three-it seemed far longer than that-the man on the right stared unbelievingly into the face of the dying man, then the realisation of his lethal blunder and the awareness that death stood now at his own elbow broke the horror-numbed spell that had held him in thrall. He struggled frantically to withdraw his knife but the last agonies of his friend had locked right hand and knife fast in an iron-bound grip. He swung round desperately on me, his left arm flying upwards and outwards in a gesture that was half blow, half an attempt to shield himself from the beam I'd now directed into his shrinking eyes, and for a moment he had no guard left. The moment was enough and to spare. The blade of my knife was twelve inches long but for all that I jarred both wrist and knife as the hilt struck home against the breast-bone. He coughed once, a brief convulsive choked sound and drew his thin lips far back from the fast-clenched teeth in to a hideous and blood-flecked grin: then the blade of my knife snapped and I was left with only the hilt and an inch of steel in my hand as the two men, still locked together, swayed over to my right and crashed heavily on to the limestone floor of the cave.

I shone the torch beam down on the faces at my feet, but it was a superfluous precaution, they would never trouble me again. I recovered my sandals, picked up the fallen knife and left, closing the door behind me. Once outside I leaned my weight against the tunnel wall, hands hanging by my side, and drew in great deep lungfuls of pure fresh air. I felt weak, but put it down to my damaged arm and the foul air inside that tomb, the brief and violent episode on the other side of that door had left me curiously unaffected, or so I thought until I felt the pain in my cheek muscles and jaw and realised that my lips were strained back in involuntary imitation of the death's head grin of the man I had just killed. It took a conscious effort of will to relax the overstrained muscles of my face.

It was then that I heard the singing. This was it, Bentall’s tottering reason had gone at last, the shock of what I'd just seen and done had overstrained more than the facial muscles. Bentall unhinged, Bentall round the bend, Bentall hearing noises in his head. What would Colonel Raine have said if he knew his trusty servant had gone off his trolley? He would probably have smiled his little invisible smile and said in his dry dusty voice that to hear singing in an abandoned mine-working, even a mine under the control of murderous impostors and patrolled by equally murderous Chinese, was not necessarily evidence of insanity. To which his trusty servant would have replied, no, it wasn't, but to hear a choir of English women singing 'Greensleeves' most certainly was.

For that was what I was hearing. Women's voices and singing 'Greensleeves'. Not a recording, for one of the voices was slightly off-key and another trying to harmonise with what I could only regard as a very limited degree of success. English women, singing 'Greensleeves'. I shook my head violently but they still kept at it. I clasped my hands over my ears and the singing stopped. I took them away and the singing started again. Noises in the head don't stop when you put your hands over your ears. Maybe the fact that there were English women down in that mine was crazy, but at least I wasn't. Still like a man in a trance, but careful, for all that, to make not the slightest whisper of sound, I pushed myself off the door and went padding down the tunnel to investigate.

The sound of the singing swelled abruptly as I followed a ninety degree turning to the left. Twenty yards away I could see a faint backwash of light against the left side of the tunnel where it seemed to make another abrupt turning, this time to the right. I drifted up to this corner like a falling snowflake and poked my head around with all the dead slow caution of an old hedgehog taking his first wary squint at the world after a winter's hibernation.

Twenty feet away the full width of the tunnel was blocked by vertical iron bars, spaced about six inches apart, with an inset grille door. Ten feet beyond that were a similar set of bars, with a similar door. Halfway between the two doors, suspended close to the roof, a naked bulb threw a harsh light over the small table directly beneath it and the two overalled men who sat one on either side of the table. Between them were a pile of curiously shaped wooden blocks and I assumed that they were playing a game, but it wasn't any game I'd ever seen. But whatever it was, it was obviously a game that called for concentration to judge by the irritated looks both men gave in the direction of the darkened space that lay behind the second set of bars. The singing showed no sign of stopping. Why people should be singing after midnight struck me as inexplicable until I remembered that to people imprisoned in a darkened cave day and night must have no meaning. Why they should be singing at all I couldn't even begin to imagine.

After maybe twenty seconds more of this, one of the men thumped his fist on the table, jumped to his feet, picked up one of two carbines that I could now see had been propped against a chair, crossed to the faraway set of bars and rattled the butt of the gun against the metal, at the same time shouting out something in an angry voice. I didn't understand the words but it didn't need a linguist to understand the meaning. He was asking for silence. He didn't get it. After a pause lasting maybe three seconds the singing came again, louder and more off-key than ever. Give them time and they'd start in on 'There'll Always Be an England'. The man with the carbine shook his head in disgust and disbelief and came wearily back to the table. The situation was beyond him.

It was beyond me too. Maybe if I hadn't been so tired, or maybe if I'd been someone else altogether, someone, say, about twice as smart as I was, I might have thought of a way to get past or even overpower the guards. But right then all I could think of was that I had one little knife and they had two big guns and that anyway I'd used up all my luck for that night.

I left.

Marie was sleeping peacefully when I finally got back to our hut and I didn't wake her at once. Let her sleep as long as she could, she wouldn't get any more sleep this night, maybe her dark fears of the future were justified after all, maybe she wasn't going to have any more sleep, ever.

Mentally, physically, emotionally, I was exhausted. Completely exhausted, let down as I'd never been before. On the way out from the mine I'd come to the conclusion that there was one thing and one thing only to do: I'd screwed what little was left of my nerve up to the sticking point to do it and when the doing had proved impossible the reaction had been correspondingly great. What I had planned to do had been to kill both Witherspoon-I still thought of him as that-and Hewell. Not kill them, murder them, murder them as they lay in their beds. Or maybe it was better to say execute them. Obviously, from the tunnel that went clear through to the other side of the island and the armoury in the mine, a full-scale attack was about to be launched on the naval establishment on the other side of the island. With Witherspoon and Hewell dead, it seemed unlikely that the leaderless Chinese would go through with it, and to me, at that moment, the prevention of the attack was the only thing that mattered. It mattered even more than the welfare of the girl asleep beside me, and I could no longer kid myself that my feelings towards her were the same as they'd been three short days ago: but she still came second.

But I hadn't killed them in their beds for the sufficient reason that neither of them had been in their beds: they'd both been across at the professor's house, drinking the chilled canned beer that the Chinese boy brought in from time to time, talking in soft voices as they pored over charts. The general and his A.D.C. preparing for D-Day. And D-Day was at hand.

The disappointment, the bitterness of what had seemed the ultimate defeat, had taken the last of the heart from me. I'd withdrawn from the window of the professor's house and just stood there dully, unthinkingly, careless of the risk of discovery, until after maybe five minutes a few of my brain cells started trudging around again. Then I'd walked heavily back up to the mine-it says much for my state of mind that the thought of repeating my earlier hands and knees crawl up there never entered my head-picked up some R.D.X. fuses and chemical igniters in the armoury, came out again, rummaged around the generating plant until I found a can of petrol and then returned.

Now I got pencil and paper, hooded the torch light and started writing a message in block capitals. It took me only three minutes and when I was finished I was far from satisfied with it, but it would have to do. I crossed the room and shook Marie by the shoulder.

She woke slowly, reluctantly, murmuring something in a drowsy voice, then sat up abruptly in bed. I could see the pale gleam of her shoulders in the dark, the movement as a hand came up to brush tousled hair away from her eyes.

"Johnny?" she whispered. "What is it? What-what did you find?"

"Too damn much. Just let me talk. We have very little time left. Know anything about radio?"

"Radio?" A brief pause. "I did the usual course. I can send Morse, not fast, but-"

"Morse I can manage myself. Do you know what frequency ships' radio operators use for sending distress messages?"

"S.O.S.'s, you mean? I'm not sure. Low frequency, isn't it? Or long wave?"

"Same thing. You can't remember the wave-band?"

She thought for a few moments and I sensed rather than saw the shake of the head in the darkness. "I'm sorry, Johnny."

"It doesn't matter." It did matter, it mattered a very great deal, but I'd been crazy even to hope. "But you'll know old Raine's private code, though?"

"Of course."

"Well, code this message, will you?" I thrust the paper, pencil and torch into her hands. "As quickly as you can."

She didn't ask me the purpose of what must have struck her as an idiotic request: she just hooded the torch under the blanket and read the message in a low voice.

The faint glow of the light died as the torch was switched off. For almost twenty seconds there was nothing to be heard but the far-off murmur of the surf on the reef, and when she finally spoke her voice was unsteady.

"You found all this out tonight, Johnny?"

"Yes. They've driven a tunnel clear through to the other side of the island. They've a well-stocked armoury hidden away in one of the caves, where they keep their blasting explosive. And I heard women's voices. Singing."

"Singing!"

"I know it sounds crazy. It must be the scientists' wives, who else could it be. Get busy on that code. I have to go out again."

"The code-how are you going to send this message?" she asked helplessly.

"Professor's radio."

"The professor's-but you're bound to wake him up."

"He isn't asleep. He and Hewell are still talking. I'll have to draw them off. I'd thought first of going up to the north for half a mile or so and setting some delayed action amatol blocks, but that wouldn't work. So I'm going to set the workers' hut on fire. I've got the petrol and fuses here."

"You're crazy." Her voice was still unsteady, but maybe she had something there. "The workers' hut is only a hundred yards from the professor's house. You could let off those amatol blocks a mile away, give yourself plenty of time and-" She broke off and then went on abruptly: "What's all the desperate hurry, anyway? What makes you so certain that they're going to attack at dawn?"

"It's the same answer to everything," I said wearily. "Letting off a few bombs to the north might draw them off all right, but as soon as they came back they'd start wondering where all the fireworks came from. It wouldn't take them any time at all to realise that they must have come from the armoury. The first thing they'll find up there is that a couple of their Chinese guards are missing. It won't take them long to find out where they are. Even if I don't set off bombs their absence is bound to be noticed by dawn at the latest, I imagine. Probably long before that. But we won't be here. If we are, they'll kill us. Me, at any rate."

"You said two guards were missing?" she said carefully. "Dead."

"You killed them?" she whispered. "More or less."

"Oh, God, must you try to be facetious?"

"I wasn't trying to be." I picked up the petrol can, fuse and igniters. "Please code that as quickly as possible."

"You're a strange person," she murmured. "I think you frighten me at times."

"I know," I said. "I should have stood there turning both cheeks at once and let our yellow friends carve me into little ribbons. I just haven't got it in me to be a Christian, that's all."

I dropped down under the back screen, lugging the can with me. Lights still burned in the professor's house. I skirted Hewell's hut and brought up at the back of the long house at the point where the steep-pitched thatch of the roof swept down to within four feet of the ground. I had little hopes of and no interest in burning the house down completely, the huge salt-water butts which stood to the rear of every house precluded any chance of that, but the thatch should make a

tidy enough blaze for all that. Slowly, painstakingly, careful to avoid even the faintest glug-glug from the neck of the can, I poured the petrol on a two foot wide strip of thatch over almost half the length of the roof, stretched out a length of R.D.X. fuse above this, one end going into the saturated thatch, the other into a chemical igniter. I placed the igniter on a small stone held in my hand, tapped it with the base of the knife, held the fuse long enough to feel the sudden warmth of the ignited powder train through its braided cover, then left at once. The empty petrol can I left under the floor of Hewell's house.

Marie was sitting at a table when I got back, a blanket draped over her and the table. From beneath the blanket came a dim yellow glow and even as I carefully lowered the side-screen facing the sea, the lamp went out. She emerged from the blanket and said softly: "Johnny?"

"Me. Finished?"

"Here it is." She handed me a slip of paper. "Thanks." I folded it away in a breast pocket and went on: "The entertainment starts in about four minutes. When Hewell and Witherspoon come ankling by be at the doorway, wide-eyed, clutching your negligee or whatever and asking the usual daft questions appropriate to such occasions. Then you'll turn round and speak into the darkness, telling me to stay where I am, that I'm not fit to go anywhere. After that, get dressed quickly, slacks, socks, shirt or cardigan, everything as dark as you can, cover up as much as you can-, hardly the ideal bathing suit but in night waters you'll look a less appetising snack to the inshore tiger sharks the professor told us about than if you were wearing a bikini. Then take the shark-repellent canisters off the two spare lifebelts and fit them-"

"Swimming?" she interrupted. "We're going swimming? Why?"

"For our lives. Two canisters and one life belt apiece, we'll make better time that way."

"But-but your arm, Johnny? And the sharks?"

"My arm won't be much good to me if I'm dead," I said heavily, "and I'll take the sharks before Hewell any day. Two minutes. I must go."

"Johnny."

"What is it?" I said impatiently.

"Be careful, Johnny."

"I'm sorry." I touched her cheek in the darkness. "I'm pretty clumsy, aren't I?"

"Clumsy is no word for it." She reached up and pressed my hand against her cheek. "Just come back, that's all."

When I got round to the back window of the professor's house, he and Hewell were still pressing on with arrangements for the second front. The conference seemed to be going well. The professor was talking in a low emphatic voice, pointing towards a chart which seemed to be some section of the Pacific, while Hewell's gigantic features cracked into a cold little half-smile from time to time. They were busy, but not too busy to drink their beer. It didn't seem to have any effect on them but it did on me, it suddenly made me realise how dry and parched my throat was. I just stood there, waiting and wishing for two things, a beer and a gun, a beer to do away with my thirst and a gun to do away with Hewell and Witherspoon. Good old Bentall, I thought bitterly, nothing of the common touch about him, whenever he wishes for something it has to be really unattainable. Which once more just showed how wrong I could be: within thirty seconds one of those wishes was mine.

The Chinese boy had just entered the room with fresh supplies for the strategists when the black oblong of window behind Hewell's head became no longer black. A vivid yellow flash suddenly lit the darkness behind the hut of the Chinese- from the professor's house the rear of the hut was invisible- and within five seconds the yellow had given way to a bright orangey red as the flames leaped up fifteen, even twenty feet, overtopping the high ridge-pole of the hut. Petrol and thatch made a combustible combination of some note.

The Chinese boy and the professor saw it in the same instant. For a man who had consumed the amount of beer he seemed to have done I must say the professor didn't spend much time on double-takes. He passed some comment which bore no resemblance to his usual 'Dear me's' and 'God bless my souls', kicked over his chair and took off like a rocket The Chinese boy had been even faster, but as it had cost him a second to lay his tray down on the nearest flat surface, which happened to be the blotter on the open roll-top desk, he arrived at the door at the same instant as Witherspoon. For a moment they jammed in the doorway, the professor made some other comment, not very learned in its nature, and then they were off, Hewell pounding along on their heels.

Five seconds later I was seated at the roll-top desk. I tore open the right-hand door, unhooked from its inside the earpieces and bakelite-bonded transmitting key, leads from both of which led to the back- of the set, clapped the earphones to my head and set the key on the table. There were a knob and a switch placed close together on the set, it seemed logical to suppose that they might be the on-off power switch and the transmitting switch, I turned the one and pressed the other and I was right. At least I'd guessed right for the power switch, the earphones filled at once with a loud insistent crackling, so obviously it drew the receiving antenna into circuit.

Low frequency, Marie had said, she'd thought distress signals went out on low frequency. I stared at the five semi-circular calibrated tuning dials, the middle one of which was already illuminated, gazed at the names of East Asiatic towns marked in English and Chinese and wondered how the hell a man could find out which was long wave and which short.

Whether I could also hear my own transmissions on the earphones I didn't know. I tapped out a few experimental S.O.S.'s but heard nothing. I shifted the switch on the set back to the position I'd found it, tapped the transmitter again, but still nothing. It was then that I caught sight of the small push-pull switch just beyond the key on the bakelite transmitter. I pulled it towards me, made the signal again and this time I heard it come clearly through on the phone. Obviously I could either transmit and receive at the same time or transmit without receiving if I felt like it.

The tuning dials were calibrated in thin black lines to show wavebands but there were no figures to indicate which bands they were. That would have made no difference to an expert operator but it made a crippling difference to me. I peered even more closely, saw that the top two bands were marked KHZ at their outer ends, the lower three MHZ. For several seconds I failed to see their significance, my head was tired now and aching almost as much as my arm, and then, miraculously, I got it. K for kilocycles, M for megacycles. The topmost of the five bands would be the longest wavelength lowest-frequency of the lot. That's where I wanted to be, or at least I hoped it was where I wanted to be. I pushed the left hand knob of a group of what I took to be waveband selector buttons and the top dial came to life as the light behind the centre dial died away.

I turned the station selector dial knob as far left as it would go and started transmitting. I would send out a group of three S.O.S.'s, wait a second, repeat, listen for three or four seconds, move a fraction up the dial and start transmitting again. It was dull work but the beer helped me along.

Ten minutes passed, during which time I must have transmitted on at least thirty different frequencies. Nothing, no acknowledgment at all. Nothing. I glanced at the clock on the wall. One minute to three. I sent out another S.O.S. call. The same answer as all the others.

I was jumping by this time. I could still see the red glare of the fire reflected on the inside walls, but there was no guarantee that Hewell and the professor were going to stay there till the last dying ember turned to charcoal. They might be back any second, or anyone happening by either of the two windows or the open door would be bound to see me, but I didn't see that it mattered very much now, if I couldn't get through on this radio I was finished anyway. What really worried me was whether anyone had yet discovered the two dead men in the mine: that way I would be finished too, only an awful lot quicker. Was somebody already conducting a search because the guards had failed to report, was the professor checking to see if I really was in bed, had anyone found the petrol can under Hewell's house…? The questions were endless and the answers to all of them held so high a degree of possibility of so high a degree of unpleasantness that I put it all out of my mind. I drank some more beer and got on with the transmitting.

The phones crackled in my ears. I bent right forward, as if that would help to bring me into closer contact with the distant sender, and sent out the distress signal again. Once more the Morse started buzzing my ears, I could make out the individual letters but not the words they spelled out. Akita Maru, Akita Mara, four times repeated. A Japanese ship. A Japanese radio operator. The Bentall luck was running true to form. I moved further across the waveband.

I wondered how Marie was getting on. She would be set to go by now and trying to figure out what on earth had happened to me, she would be looking at the time and knowing that the dawn was only three hours to go, that those three hours might be all the time we had left unless the dead men were discovered, in which case the time would be less. Maybe a great deal less. I kept on sending and composed a little speech I was going to make to Colonel Raine. When I got back. If I got back.

Fast fluent Morse started stuttering through the earphones. First the acknowledgment signal followed by: "U.S. Frigate 'Novair County': position: name?"

A U.S. Frigate! Maybe only a hundred miles away. God, it would be the answer to everything! A frigate. Guns, machine-guns, armed men, everything. Then my elation ebbed a

trifle. Position? Name? Of course, in a genuine S.O.S., position came first, always.

"150 miles south of Fiji," I tapped. "Vardu-"

"Lat. and long.?" the operator cut in. He was sending so fast that I could hardly pick it up.

"Uncertain."

"What ship?"

"No ship. Island. Island of Vardu-"

Again he overrode my transmission.

"Island?"

"Yes."

"Get off the air, you damn fool, and stay off it. This is a distress frequency." With that the transmission ended abruptly.

I could have kicked that damned transmitter all the way into the lagoon. I could have done the same with the duty operator on the 'Novair County'. I could have wept with frustration, but it was far too late for tears. Besides, I could hardly blame him. I sent again on the same frequency, but the operator on the 'Novair County'-it could have been no other-just leaned on his transmitting button and kept on leaning till I gave up. I twisted the selector dial again, but only a fraction. I'd learnt one invaluable thing: I was on the distress frequency. Keep burning, hut, I beseeched it silently, keep burning. For old Bentall's sake, please don't go out. Which was quite a lot to ask considering what I'd done to the hut

It kept burning and I kept transmitting. Within twenty seconds I got another reply, the acknowledgment, then: "S.S. Annandale. Position?"

"Australian registry?" I sent.

"Yes. Position, repeat position." Getting testy and understandably so: when a man's shouting for help he shouldn't first of all enquire into the pedigree of his rescuer. I hesitated for a second before sending, I had to make an immediate impact on the operator or I'd likely get as short shrift as I'd had from the U.S. Navy. The distress frequency is sacrosanct to all nations.

"Special British ^Government investigator John Bentall requesting immediate relay coded message via Portishead radio to Admiralty Whitehall London. Desperately urgent."

"Are you sinking?"

I waited for a few assorted blood vessels to burst but when none did I sent: "Yes." In the circumstances it seemed that it might save a great deal of misunderstanding. "Please prepare receive message." I was almost certain that the glare outside was beginning to die down: there wouldn't be much of the hut left by this time.

There was a long pause. Someone was taking time to make up his mind. Then came the single word "Priority." It was a question.

"Telegraphic address carries over-riding priority all signals to London."

That got him.

"Proceed with message."

I proceeded, forcing myself to tap it out slowly and accurately. The red glow was fading on the inside of the walls of the room. The fierce roar of flames had died away to a lazy crackling and I thought I could hear voices. My neck was stiff from glancing back over my shoulder through the window nearest the fire, but I didn't need my eyes to transmit with and I got the message through. I finished: "Please dispatch immediately."

There was a pause of maybe thirty seconds then he came through again. "Master authorises immediate transmission. Are you in danger?"

"Vessel approaching," I sent. That would keep them quiet. "O.K." A sudden thought occurred to me. "What is your position?"

"Two hundred miles due east Newcastle."

For all the help that was they might as well have been orbiting the earth in a satellite, so I sent: "Thank you very much." And signed off.

I replaced the transmitting key and headphones, closed up the doors and went to the window, poking a cautious head round the corner. I'd been wrong about the value of these big salt-water butts, where the workers' hut had been there remained now only a five-foot high pile of glowing red embers and ashes. I'd get no Oscars for counter-espionage but as an arsonist I was neck and neck with the best. At least I wasn't a complete failure. Hewell and the professor were standing together, presumably talking, as the Chinese dumped buckets of water on the smouldering remains, and as there didn't seem to be much that they would be able to do at this late stage they'd likely be along any minute. Time to be gone. I went along the centre passage, turned right to pass through the still lit kitchen and then halted in a way that would have made an observer think that I had run into an invisible brick wall.

What had brought me up so short was the sight of a pile of canned beer empties lying in a wicker basket. My God, the beer. Good old Bentall, never missed a thing, not if you held it six inches from his nose and beat him over the head with a club to attract his attention. I'd drained two full beer glasses back in the living-room there, and just left the empties standing: even with all the excitement neither the professor nor Hewell struck me as a man who would be liable to forget that he had left a full glass behind him-certainly the Chinese house-boy wouldn't-and they wouldn't put it down to evaporation from the heat of the fire either. I picked up another couple of cans from the crate on the floor, opened them in four seconds flat with the steel opener lying on the sink unit, ran back to the desk in the living-room and filled up the two glasses again, holding them at a shallow angle so that a head too suspiciously high wouldn't be formed on the beer. Back in the kitchen again I dropped the cans among the other empties-in the pile that had been consumed that night another two were liable to go unnoticed-and then left the house. I wasn't any too soon, for I could see the house-boy making for the front door, but I got back to our house unobserved.

I entered under the seaward screen and saw the outline of Marie against the front doorway where she was still watching what was left of the fire. I whispered her name and she came tome.

"Johnny!" She seemed glad to see me in a way that no one I could ever remember had been glad to see me before. "I've died about a hundred times since you left here."

"Is that all?" I put my good arm around her and squeezed and said: "I got the message through, Marie."

"The message?" I was pretty well worn out that night, mentally as well as physically, but even so it took a pretty slow type to miss the fact that he'd just been paid the biggest compliment of his life. But I missed it. "You-you got it through? How wonderful, Johnny!"

"Luck. A sensible sparks on an Aussie ship. Halfway to London by this time. And then things will happen. What, I don't know. If there are any British, American or French naval craft near, they'll be nearer still in a few hours. Or detachments of soldiers by flying boat, maybe from Sydney. I don't know. But what I do know is that they won't be here in time-"

"Sshh," she touched my lips with her finger. "Someone coming."

I heard the two voices, one quick and sharp, the other like a cement truck grinding up a grade in low gear. Witherspoon and Hewell. Maybe ten yards away, maybe not even that: through the interstices in the screen wall I could see the swinging of the lantern that one or other of them was carrying. I leapt for the bed, fumbled desperately for a pajama jacket, found one, shrugged into it and buttoned it up to the neck and dived under a blanket. I landed on the elbow of my injured arm and when I propped myself up on the other as a knock came and the two men entered without benefit of invitation, it was no difficulty at all to look sick and pale. Heaven knows I felt it.

"You must excuse us, Mrs. Bentall," the professor said with that nice mixture of smoothness, concern and undiluted unctuousness that would have made me sick if I hadn't been that way already. But I had to admire his terrific powers of dissimulation under any and all circumstances: in the light of what I had seen, heard and done it was difficult to remember that we were still playing games of make-believe. "We were naturally anxious to see if you were all right. Most distressing this, really most distressing." He patted Marie's shoulder in a paternal fashion that I would have ignored a couple of days ago, and brought his lantern closer to have a good look at me. "Merciful heavens, my boy, you don't look well at all! How do you feel?"

"It's only during the night that it gives me a little trouble," I said bravely. I had my head half-turned away ostensibly because the bright beam from the lantern was hurting my half-closed eyes but actually because, in the circumstances, it seemed hardly advisable to waft too many beer fumes in his direction. "I'll be fine tomorrow. That was a terrible fire, professor. I wish I'd been fit to give you a hand: How on earth could it have started?"

"Those damned Chinks," Hewell growled. He was looming massively just outside the direct radiance of the light and the deep-sunk eyes were quite lost under the craggy overhang of his great tufted brows. "Pipe-smokers and always making tea on little spirit stoves. I've warned them often enough."

"And against all regulations," the professor put in testily. "They know it very well. Still, we won't be here so much longer and they can sleep in the drying shed until then. Hope you haven't been too upset about this. We'll leave you now. Nothing we can do for you, my dear?"

I didn't think he was talking to me so I lowered myself down to the pillow with a stifled moan. Marie thanked him and said no.

"Good night, then. Incidentally, come across for breakfast when it suits you in the morning and my boy will be there to serve you. Hewell and I will, be up betimes tomorrow." He chuckled ruefully. "This archaeology is like a mild poison in the blood-once it gets there it never lets you go."

He patted Marie's shoulder a bit more and took off. I waited till Marie reported that they'd reached the professor's house, then said: "As I was saying before the interruption, help will come but not in time to save our bacon. Not if we stay here. Got the lifebelts and shark-repellent ready?"

"They're a horrible pair, aren't they?" she murmured. "I wish that murderous old goat would keep his hands to himself. Yes, they're ready. Must we, Johnny?"

"Damn it all, can't you see that we must leave?"

"Yes, but-"

"We can't go by land. Sheer mountains on one side, a cliff on the other and a couple of barbed wire fences and assorted Chinese in between make that impossible. We could go through the tunnel, but though three or four fit men might pickaxe their way through the last few feet in an hour, I couldn't do it in a week the way I'm feeling."

"You could blast it down? You know where the supplies-"

"Heaven help us both," I said. "You're just as ignorant as I am. Tunnelling is a skilled occupation. If we didn't bring the roof down on top of us we'd certainly completely seal off the end of the tunnel and then our pals could come along and nab us at their leisure. And we can't go by boat, for the simple reason that both boatmen sleep in the boathouse and anyway it would be no good, if that simple method of approach was open to Witherspoon and Hewell and the doughty Captain Fleck available to them they wouldn't tunnel all that way through rock. If the Navy takes such precautions with fences and guards against imagined friends, what are they going to take against the sea where anybody may turn up? You can bet your life that they have two or three small interlocking radar positions capable of picking up a seagull swimming ashore, with a few quick-firing guns to back them up.

"The only thing I'm against is leaving the scientists and their wives here. But I don't see-"

"You never mentioned that the scientists were there," she said in quick surprise.

"No? Maybe I thought it was obvious. Maybe it's not. Maybe I'm wrong. But why else in the name of heaven should the wives be there? The Navy is working on some project of clearly considerable importance and this damned murdering white-haired old monster is just biding his time to pinch it. From his last remark, lying in his teeth to the end, I gather he's biding no more. He's going to get this thing, whatever it is, and use the wives as levers to make the back-room boys work on it and develop it further, for what purposes I can't even guess except that they're bound to be nefarious." I climbed stiffly out of the bed and pulled off the pajama jacket. "What other alternative occurs to you? Eight missing wives, ditto scientists. Witherspoon's bound to be using those wives as a lever, if they were of no use to him in that capacity he wouldn't even bother to feed them, he wouldn't waste anything on them except for a few ounces of lead, as he did for the genuine Witherspoon and others. The man is devoid of feeling to the point of insanity. Where the wives are, there the husbands are. You don't think Colonel Raine sent us out to the Fijis just to do the hula-hula dance, do you?"

"That's Hawaii," she murmured. "Not Fiji."

"My God!" I said. "Women!"

"I'm only teasing, you clown." She put her arms round my neck and came close to me: her hands were abnormally cold and she was trembling. "Don't you see I have to? I just can't go on talking about it. I thought I was quite good-in this business-and so did Colonel Raine, but I don't think so any longer. There's too much-there's too much calculated inhumanity, such an absolute indifference to good or evil or morality, just what's expedient, there's all those men murdered for no reason, there's us, and I think you're crazy to hope for us, there's all those poor women, especially those poor women…" She broke off, gave a long quivering sigh and whispered: "Tell me again about you and me and the lights of London."

So I told her, told her so that I half believed it myself, and I thought she did too, for by and by she grew still, but when I kissed her her lips were like ice and she turned away and buried her face in my neck. I held her so for all of a minute, then, on mutual impulse at the same moment, we parted and started to fasten on the lifebelts.

The remains of the workers' hut was now no more than an acrid-smelling dark red glow under the blackness of an overcast sky. The lights still burned in the professor's window. I would have taken odds that he had no intention of going to sleep that night: I was beginning to know enough of his nature to suspect that the exhaustion of a sleepless night would be small price to pay for the endless delights of savouring to the full the delightful anticipations of the pleasures of the day that was to come.

It started to rain as we left, the heavy drops sputtering to sibilant extinction in the dying fire. It couldn't have been better for us. Nobody saw us go, for nobody could have seen us unless they had been within ten feet. We walked almost a mile and a half to the south along the sea-shore and then as we approached the area where Hewell's Chinese might be loitering as they'd been the night before, we took to the sea. We went out about twenty-five yards, to waist level, half-walking, half-swimming along: but when we came to the spot where I could just barely discern through the rain the dark overhang of the cliff that marked the beginning of the barbed wire, we made for the deeper water until we were over two hundred yards out. It didn't seem likely, but the moon might just conceivably break through.

We inflated our lifebelts, very slowly, although I hardly thought the sound would carry to shore. The water was cool, but not cold. I swam in the lead and as I did I turned the operating screw of the shark-repellent canister and a darkish evil-smelling liquid-it would probably have been yellow in daylight-with extraordinary dissolving and spreading qualities spread over the surface of the sea. I don't know what the shark-repellent did to the sharks, but it certainly repelled me.