The Eye of the Tiger

The Eye Of The Tiger by Wilbur Smith

“TIGER! TIGER! burning bright In the forests of the night … In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes?” William Blake

It was one of those seasons when the fish came late.

I worked my boat and crew hard, running far northwards each day, coming back into Grand Harbour long after dark each night, but it was November the 6th when we picked up the first of the big ones riding down on the wine purple swells of the Mozambique current.

By this time I was desperate for a fish. My charter was a party of one, an advertising wheel from New York named Chuck Mcgeorge, one of my regulars who made the annual six-thousand-mile pilgrimage to St. Mary’s island for the big marlin. He was a short wiry little man, bald as an ostrich egg and grey at the temples, with a wizened brown monkey face but the good hard legs that are necessary to take on the big fish.

When at last we saw the fish, he was riding high in the water, showing the full length of his fin, longer than a man’s arm and with the scimitar curve that distinguishes it from shark or porpoise.

Angelo spotted him at the instant that I did, and he hung out on the foredeck stay and yelled with excitement, his gipsy curls dangling on his dark cheeks and his teeth flashing in the brilliant tropical sunlight.

The fish crested and wallowed, the water opening about him so that he looked like a forest log, black and heavy and massive, his tail fin echoing the graceful curve of the dorsal, before he slid down into the next trough and the water closed over his broad glistening back.

I turned and glared down into the cockpit. Chubby was already helping Chuck into the big fighting chair, clinching the heavy harness and gloving him up, but he looked up and caught my eye.

Chubby scowled heavily and spat over the side, in complete contrast to the excitement that gripped the rest of us. Chubby is a huge man, as tall as I am but a lot heavier in the shoulder and gut.

He is also one of the most staunch and consistent pessimists in the business.

“Shy fish!” grunted Chubby, and spat again. I grinned at him.

“Don’t mind him, Chuck,” I called, “old Harry is going to set you into that fish.” “I’ve got a thousand bucks that says you don’t,” Chuck shouted back, his face screwed up against the dazzle of the sun-flecked sea, but his eyes twinkling with excitement.

“You’re on!” I accepted a bet I couldn’t afford and turned my attention to the fish.

Chubby was right, of course. After me, he is the best billfish man in the entire world. The fish was big and shy and scary. Five times I had the baits to him, working him with all the skill and cunning I could muster. Each time he turned away and sounded as I brought Wave Dancer in on a converging course to cross his beak.

“Chubby, there is a fresh dolphin bait. in the ice box: haul in the teasers, and we’ll run him with a single bait,” I shouted despairingly.

I put the dolphin to him. I had rigged the bait myself and it swam with a fine natural action in the water. I recognized the instant in which the marlin accepted the bait. He seemed to hunch his great shoulders and I caught the flash of his belly, like a mirror below the surface, as he turned.

“Follow!“screamed Angelo. “He follows!”

I set Chuck into the fish at a little after ten o’clock in the morning, and I fought him close. Superfluous line in the water would place additional strain on the man at the rod. My job required infinitely more skill than gritting the teeth and hanging on to the heavy fibreglass rod. I kept Wave Dancer running hard on the fish through the first frenzied charges and frantic flashing leaps until Chuck could settle down in the fighting chair and lean on the marlin, using those fine fighting legs of his.

A few minutes after noon, Chuck had the fish beaten. He was on the surface, in the first of the wide circles which Chuck would narrow with each turn until we had him at the gaff.

“Hey, Harry!” Angelo called suddenly, breaking my concentration. “We got a visitor, man!”

“What is it, Angelo?”

“Big Johnny coming up current.” He pointed. “Fish is bleeding, he’s smelt it.”

I looked and saw the shark coming. The blunt fin moving up steadily, drawn by the struggle and smell of blood. He was a big hammerhead, and I called to Angelo.

“Bridge, Angelo,“and I gave him the wheel.

“Harry, you let that bastard chew my fish and you can kiss your thousand bucks goodbye,” Chuck grunted sweatily at me from the fighting chair, and I dived into the main cabin.

Dropping to my knees I knocked open the toggles that held down the engine hatch and I slid it open.

Lying on my belly, I reached up under the decking and grasped the stock of the FN carbine hanging in its special concealed slings of inner tubing.

As I came out on to the deck I checked the loading of the rifle, and pushed the selector on to automatic fire. “Angelo, lay me alongside that old Johnny.”

Hanging over the rail in Wave Dancer’s bows, I looked down on to the shark as Angelo ran over him. He was a hammerhead all right, a big one, twelve feet from tip to tail, coppery bronze through the clear water.

I aimed carefully between the monstrous eyestalks which flattened and deformed the shark’s head, and I fired a short burst.

The FN roared, the empty brass cases spewed from the weapon and the water erupted in quick stabbing splashes. The shark shuddered convulsively as the bullets smashed into his head, shattering the gristly bone and bursting his tiny brain. He rolled over and began to sink.

“Thanks, Harry,” Chuck gasped, sweating and red-faced in the chair.

“All part of the service,” I grinned at him, and went to take the wheel from Angelo.

At ten minutes to one, Chuck brought the marlin up to the gaff, punishing him until the great fish came over on his side, the sickle tail beating feebly, and the long beak opening and shutting spasmodically. The glazed single eye was as big as a ripe apple, and the long body pulsed and shone with a thousand flowing shades of silver and gold and royal purple.

“Cleanly now, Chubby,” I shouted, as I got a gloved hand on the steel trace and drew the fish gently towards where Chubby waited with the stainless-steel hook at the gaff held ready.

Chubby withered me with a glance that told me clearly that he had been pulling the steel into billfish when I was still a gutter kid in a London slum.

“Wait for the roll,” I cautioned him again, just to plague him a little, and Chubby’s lip curled at the unsolicited advice.

The swell rolled the fish up to us, opening the wide chest that glowed silver between the spread wings of the pectoral fins.

“Now!” I said, and Chubby sank the steel in deep. In a burst of bright crimson heart blood, the fish went into its death frenzy, beating the surface to flashing white and drenching us all under fifty gallons of thrown sea water.

I hung the fish on Admiralty Wharf from the derrick of the crane.

Benjamin, the harbour-master, signed a certificate for a total weight of eight hundred and seventeen pounds. Although the vivid fluorescent colours had faded in death to flat sooty black, yet it was impressive for its sheer bulk - fourteen feet six inches from the point of its bill to the tip of its flaring swallow tail.

“Mister Harry done hung a Moses on Admiralty,” the word was carried through the streets by running barefooted urchins, and the islanders joyously snatched at the excuse to cease work and crowd the wharf in fiesta array.

The word travelled as far as old Government House on the bluff, and the presidential Land-Rover came buzzing down the twisting road with the gay little flag fluttering on the bonnet. It butted its way through the crowd and deposited the great man on the wharf. Before independence, Godfrey Biddle had been St. Mary’s only solicitor, island, born and London-trained.

“Mister Harry, what a magnificent specimen,” he cried delightedly.

A fish like this would give impetus to St. Mary’s budding tourist trade, and he came to clasp my hand. As State Presidents go in this part of the world, he was top of the class.

“Thank you, Mr. President, sir.” Even with the black homburg on his head, he reached to my armpit. He was a symphony in black, black wool suit, and patent leather shoes, skin the colour of polished anthracite and only a fringe of startlingly white fluffy hair curling around his ears.

“You really are to be congratulated.” President Biddle was dancing with excitement, and I knew I’d be eating at Government House on guest nights again this season. It had taken a year or two - but the President had finally accepted me as though I was island-born. I was one of his children, with all the special privilege that this position carried with it.

Fred Coker arrived in his hearse, but armed with his photographic equipment, and while he set up his tripod and disappeared under the black cloth to focus the ancient camera, we posed for him beside the colossal carcass. Chuck in the middle holding the rod, with the rest of us grouped around him, arms folded like a football team. Angelo and I were grinning and Chubby was scowling horrifically into the lens.

The picture would look good in my new advertising brochure - loyal crew and intrepid skipper, hair curling out from under his cap and from the vee of his shirt, all muscle and smiles - it would really pack them in next season.

I arranged for the fish to go into the cold room down at the pineapple export sheds. I would consign it out to Rowland Wards of London for mounting on the next refrigerated shipment. Then I left Angelo and Chubby to scrub down Dancer’s decks, refuel her across the harbour at the Shell basin and take her out to moorings.

As Chuck and I climbed into the cab of my battered old Ford pick-up, Chubby sidled across like a racecourse tipster, speaking out of the corner of his mouth.

“Harry, about my billfish bonus-” I knew exactly what he was going to ask, we went through this every time.

“Mrs. Chubby doesn’t have to know about it, right?” I finished for him.

“That’s right,” he agreed lugubriously, and pushed his filthy deep-sea cap to the back of his head.

I put Chuck on the plane at nine the next morning and I sang the whole way down from the plateau, honking the horn of my battered old Ford pick-up at the island girls working in the pineapple fields. They straightened up with big flashing smiles under the brims of the wide straw hats and waved.

At Coker’s Travel Agency I changed Chucks American Express traveller’s cheques, haggling the rate of exchange with Fred Coker. He was in full fig, tailcoat and black tie. He had a funeral at noon.

The camera and tripod laid up for the present, photographer became undertaker.

Coker’s Funeral Parlour was in the back of the Travel Agency opening into the alley, and Fred used the hearse to pick up tourists at the airport, first discreetly changing his advertising board on the vehicle and putting the seats in over the rail for the coffins.

I booked all my charters through him, and he clouted his ten per cent off my traveller’s cheques. He had the insurance agency as well, and he deducted the annual premium for Dancer before carefully counting out the balance. I recounted just as carefully, for although Fred looks like a schoolmaster, tall and thin and prim, with just enough island blood to give him a healthy all-over tan, he knows every trick in the book and a few which have not been written down yet.

He waited patiently while I checked, taking no offence, and when I stuffed the roll into my back pocket, his gold pince-nez sparkled and he told me like a loving father, “Don’t forget you have a charter party coming in tomorrow, Mister Harry.”

That’s all right, Mr. Coker - don’t you worry, my crew will be just fine.”

They are down at the Lord Nelson already,” he told me delicately.

Fred keeps his finger firmly on the islan’s pulse. “Mr. Coker, I’m running a charter boat, not a temperance society. Don’t worry,” I repeated, and stood up. “Nobody ever died of a hangover.”

I crossed Drake Street to Edward’s Store and a hero’s welcome. Ma Eddy herself came out from behind the counter and folded me into her warm pneumatic bosom.

“Mister Harry,” she cooed and fussed me, “I went down to the wharf to see the fish you hung yesterday.” Then she turned still holding me and shouted at one of her counter girls, “Shirley, you get Mister Harry a nice cold beer now, hear?”

I hauled out my roll. The pretty little island girls chittered like sparrows when they saw it, and Ma Eddy rolled her eyes and hugged me closer.

“What do I owe you, Missus Eddy?” From June to November is a long offseason, when the fish do not run, and Ma Eddy carries me through that lean time.

I propped myself against the counter with a can of beer in my hand, picking the goods I needed from the shelves and watching their legs as the girls in their mini-skirts clambered up the ladders to fetch them down - old Harry feeling pretty good and cocky with that hard lump of green stuff in his back pocket.

Then I went down to the Shell Company basin and the manager met me at the door of his office between the big silver fuel storage tanks.

“God, Harry, I’ve been waiting for you all morning. Head Office has been screaming at me about your bill.”

“Your waiting is over, brother,” I told him. But Wave Dancer, like most beautiful women, is an expensive mistress, and when I climbed back into the pick-up, the lump in my pocket was severely depleted.

They were waiting for me in the beer garden of the Lord Nelson.

The island is very proud of its associations with the Royal Navy, despite the fact that it is no longer a British possession but revels in an independence of six years’ standing; yet for two hundred years previously it had been a station of the British fleet. Old prints by long-dead artists decorated the public bar, depicting the great ships beating up the channel or lying in grand harbour alongside Admiralty Wharf - men-of-war and merchantmen of John Company victualled and refitted here before the long run south to the Cape of Good Hope and the Atlantic.

St. Mary’s has never forgotten her place in history, nor the admirals and mighty ships that made their landfall here. The Lord Nelson is a parody of its former grandeur, but I enjoy its decayed and seedy elegance and its associations with the past more than the tower of glass and concrete that Hilton has erected on the headland above the harbour.

Chubby and his wife sat side by side on the bench against the far wall, both of them in their Sunday clothes. This was the easiest way to tell them apart, the fact that Chubby wore the three-piece suit which he had bought for his wedding - the buttons straining and gaping, and the deep-sea cap stained with salt crystals and fish blood on his head - while his wife wore a full-length black dress of heavy wool, faded greenish with age, and black button-up boots beneath. Otherwise their dark mahogany faces were almost identical, though Chubby was freshly shaven and she did have a light moustache.

“Hello, Missus Chubby, how are you?” I asked. “Thank you, Mister Harry.”

“Will you take a little something, then?”

“Perhaps just a little orange gin, Mister Harry, with a small bitter to chase it down.”

While she sipped the sweet liquor, I counted Chubby’s wages into her hand, and her lips moved as she counted silently in chorus. Chubby watched anxiously, and I wondered once again how he had managed all these years to fool her on the billfish bonus.

Missas Chubby drained the beer and the froth emphasized her moustache.

“I’ll be Off then, Mister Harry.” She rose majestically, and sailed from the courtyard. I waited until she turned into Frobisher Street before I slipped Chubby the little sheath of notes under the table and we went into the private bar together.

Angelo had a girl on each side of him and one on his lap. His black silk shirt was open. to the belt buckle, exposing gleaming chest muscles. His denim pants fitted skin-tight, leaving no doubt as to his gender, and his boots were hand-tooled and polished westerns. He had greased his hair and sleeked it back in the style of the young Presley.

He flashed his grin like a stage lamp across the room and when I paid him he tucked a banknote into the front of each girl’s blouse.

“Hey, Eleanor, you go sit on Harry’s lap, but careful now.

Harry’s a virgin - you treat him right, hear?” He roared with delighted laughter and turned to Chubby.

“Hey, Chubby, you quit giggling like that all the time, man!

That’s stupid - all that giggling and grinning.” Chubby’s frown deepened, his whole face crumbling into folds and wrinkles like that of a bulldog. “Hey, Mister barman, you give old Chubby a drink now.

Perhaps that will stop him cutting up stupid, giggling like that.”

At four that afternoon Angelo had driven his girls off, and he sat with his glass on the table top before him. Beside it lay his bait knife honed to a razor edge and glinting evilly in the overhead lights.

He muttered darkly to himself, deep in alcoholic melancholy. Every few minutes he would test the edge of the knife with his thumb and scowl around the room. Nobody took any notice of him.

Chubby sat on the other side of me, grinning like a great brown toad - exposing a set of huge startlingly white teeth with pink plastic gums.

“Harry,” he told me expansively, one thick muscled arm around my neck. “You are a good boy, Harry. You know what, Harry, I’m going to tell you now what I never told you before.” He nodded wisely as he gathered himself for the declaration he made every pay day. “Harry, I love you man. I love you better than my own brother.”

I lifted the stained cap and lightly caressed the bald brown dome of his head. “And you are my favourite eggshell blond,” I told him.

He held me at arm’s length for a moment, studying my face, then burst into a lion’s roar of laughter. It was completely infectious and we were both still laughing when Fred Coker walked in and sat down at the table. He adjusted his pince-nez and said primly, “Mister Harry, I have just received a special delivery from London. Your charter cancelled.” I stopped laughing.

“What the hell!” I said. Two weeks without a charter in the middle of high season and only a lousy two-hundreddollar reservation fee.

“Mr. Coker, you have got to get me a party.” I had three hundred dollars left in my pocket from Chuck’s charter. “You got to get me a party,” I repeated, and Angelo picked up his knife and with a crash drove the point deeply into the table top. Nobody took any notice of him, and he scowled angrily around the room.

“I’ll try,” said Fred Coker, “but it’s a bit late now.”

“Cable the parties we had to turn down.”

“Who will pay for the cables?” Fred asked delicately.

“The hell with it, I’ll pay.” And he nodded and went out. I heard the hearse start up outside.

“Don’t worry, Harry,” said Chubby. “I still love you, man.”

Suddenly beside me Angelo went to sleep. He fell forward and his forehead hit the table top with a resounding crack. I rolled his head so that he would not drown in the puddle of spilled liquor, returned the knife to its sheath, and took charge of his bank roll to protect him from the girls who were hovering close.

Chubby ordered another round and began to sing a rambling, mumbling shanty in island patois, while I sat and worried.

Once again I was stretched out neatly on the financial rack. God how I hate money - or rather the lack of it. Those two weeks would make all the difference as to whether or not Dancer and I could survive the offseason, and still keep our good resolutions. I knew we couldn’t. I knew we would have to go on the night run again.

The hell with it, if we had to do it, we might as well do it now.

I would pass the word that Harry was ready to do a deal. Having made the decision, I felt again that pleasurable tightening of the nerves, the gut thing that goes with danger. The two weeks of cancelled time might not be wasted after all.

I joined Chubby in song, not entirely certain that we were singing the same number, for I seemed to reach the end of each chorus a long time before Chubby.

It was probably this musical feast that called up the law. On St. Mary’s this takes the form of an Inspector and four troopers, which is more than adequate for the island. Apart from a great deal of “carnal knowledge under the age of consent” and a little wife-beating, there is no crime worthy of the name.

Inspector Peter Daly was a young man with a blond moustache, a high English colour on smooth cheeks and pale blue eyes set close together like those of a sewer rat. He wore the uniform of the British, colonial police, the cap with the silver badge and shiny patent leather peak, the khaki drill starched and ironed until it crackled softly as he walked, the polished leather belt and Sam Browne cross straps. He carried a malacca cane swagger stick which was also covered with polished leather. Except for the green and yellow St. Mary’s shoulder flashes, he looked like the Empire’s pride, but like the Empire the men who wore the uniform had also crumbled.

mr Fletcher he said, standing over our table and slapping the swagger stick lightly against his Palm. “I hope we are not going to have any trouble tonight.”

Sir I prompted him. Inspector Daly and I were never friends - I don’t like bullies, or persons who in Positions of trust supplement a perfectly adequate salary with bribes and kick-backs. He had taken a lot of my hard-won gold from me in the past, which was his most unforgivable sin.

His mouth hardened under the blond moustache and his colour came up quickly. “Sir,” he repeated reluctantly.

Now it is true that once or twice in the remote past Chubby and I had given way to an excess of boyish high spirits when we had just hung a Moses fish - however, this did not give Inspector Daly any excuse for talking like that. He was after all a mere expatriate out on the island for a three-year contract - which I knew from the President himself would not be renewed.

Inspector, am I correct in my belief that this is a public place - and that neither my friends nor I are committing a trespass?”

That is so.” Then Am I also correct in thinking that singing of decent songs in a public place does not constitute a criminal act?”

Well, that is true, but, - Inspector, piss off I told him pleasantly. He hesitated, looking at Chubby and me. Between the two of us we make up a lot of muscle, and he could see the unholy battle gleam in our eyes. You could see he wished he had his troopers with him.

“I’ll be keeping an eye on you,” he said and, clutching at his dignity like a beggar’s rags, he left us. Chubby, you sing like an angel,” I said and he beamed at me.

“Harry, I’m going to buy you a drink.” And Fred Coker arrived in time to be included in the round. He drank lager and lime juice which turned my stomach a little, but his tidings were an effective antidote.

“Mister Harry, I got you a party.”

“Mister Coker, I love you.” “I love you too,” said Chubby, but deep down I felt a twinge of disappointment. I had been looking forward to another night run.

“When are they arriving?” I asked.

“They are here already - they were waiting for me at my office when I got back.”

“No kidding.”

“They knew that your first party had cancelled, and they asked for you by name. They must have come in on the same plane as the special delivery.”

My thinking was a little muzzy right then or I might have pondered a moment how neatly one party had with, drawn and another had stepped in.

“They are staying up at the Hilton.”

“Do they want me to pick them up?”

“No, they’ll meet you at Admiralty Wharf ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

I was grateful that the party had asked for such a late starting time. That morning Dancer was crewed by zombies. Angelo groaned and turned a light chocolate colour every time he bent over to coil a rope or rig the rods and Chubby sweated neat alcohol and his expression was truly terrifying. He had not spoken a word all morning.

I wasn’t feeling all that cheerful myself. Dancer was snugged up alongside the wharf and I leaned on the rail of the flying bridge with my darkest pair of Polaroids over my eyes and although MY scalp itched I was afraid to take Off my cap In case the top of my skull came with it.

The island’s single taxi, a “62 Citroin, came down Drake Street and stopped at the top end of the wharf to deposit my party-There were two of them, and I had expected three, Coker had definitely said a party of three.

They started down the long stone-Paved wharf, walking side by side, and I straightened up slowly as I watched them. I felt my physical distress fade into the realm of the inconsequential, to be replaced by that gut thing again, the slow coiling and clenching within, and the little tickling feeling along the back of my arms and in the nape of the neck.

One was tall and walked with that loose easy gait of a professional athlete. He was bare-headed and his hair was pale gingery and combed carefully across a prematurely balding pate so the pink scalp showed through. However, he was lean around the belly and hips, and he was aware. It was the only word to describe the charged sense of readiness that emanated from him.

It takes one to recognize one. This was a man trained to live with and by violence-He was muscle, a soldier, in the jargon. It mattered not for which side of the law he exercised his skills - law enforcement or its frustration - he was very bad news. I had hoped never to see this kind of barracuda cruising St. Mary’s Placid waters-It gave me a sick little slide in the guts to know that it had found me out again. Quickly I glanced at the other man, it wasn’t so obvious in him, the edge was blunted a little, the outline blurred by time and flesh, but it was there also - more bad news. “All this, and

“Nice going, Harry,” I told myself bitterly.

a hangover thrown in.”

Clearly now I recognized that the older man was the leader. He walked half a pace ahead, the younger taller man paying him that respect. He was a few years my senior also, probably late thirties.

There was the beginnings of a paunch over the crocodile skin belt, and pouches of flesh along the line of his jawbone, but his hair had been styled in Bond Street and he wore his Sulka silk shirt and Gucci loafers like badges of rank. As he came on down the wharf he dabbed at his chin and upper lip with a white handkerchief and I guessed the diamond on his little finger at two carats. It was set in a plain gold ring and the wrist watch was gold also, probably by Lanvin or Piaget.

“Fletcherr he asked, stopping below me on the jetty. His eyes were black and beady, like those of a ferret. A predator’s eyes, bright without warmth. I saw he was older than I had guessed, for his hair was certainly tinted to conceal the grey. The skin of his cheeks was unnaturally tight and I could see the scars of plastic surgery in the hair line. He’d had a facelift, a vain man then, and I stored the knowledge.

He was an old soldier, risen from the ranks to a position of command. He was the brain, and the man that followed him was the muscle. Somebody had sent out their first team and, with a clairvoyant flash, I realized why my original party had cancelled.

A phone call followed by a visit from this pair would put the average citizen off marlin-fishing for life. They had probably done themselves a serious injury in their rush to cancel.

“Mr. Materson? Come aboard-” One thing was certain, they had not come for the fishing, and I decided on a low and humble profile until I had figured out the percentages, so I threw in a belated ” - sir.”

The muscle man jumped down to the deck, landing softfooted like a cat and I saw the way that the folded coat over his arm swung heavily, there was something weighty in the pocket. He confronted, my crew, thrusting out his jaw and running his eyes over them swiftly.

Angelo flashed a watered-down version of the celebrated smile and touched the brim of his cap. “Welcome, sir.” And Chubby’s scowl lightened momentarily and he muttered something that sounded like a curse, but was probably a warm greeting. The man ignored them and turned to hand Materson down to the deck where he waited while his bodyguard checked out Dancer’s main saloon. Then he went in and I followed him.

Our accommodation is luxurious, at a hundred and twenty-five thousand nicker it should be. The air, conditioning had taken the bite out of the morning heat and Materson sighed with relief and dabbed again with his handkerchief as he sank into one of the padded seats.

This is Mike Guthrie.” He indicated the muscle who was moving about the cabin checking at the ports, opening doors and generally, overplaying his hand, coming on very tough and hard.

“My pleasure, Mr. Guthrie.” I grinned with all my boyish charm, and he waved airily without glancing at me.

“A drink, gentlemen? I asked, as I opened the liquor cabinet.

They took a Coke each, but I needed something medicinal for the shock and the hangover. The first swallow of cold beer from the can revitalized me.

Well, gentlemen, I think I shall be able to offer you some sport.

only yesterday I hung a very good fish, and all the signs are for a big run—2 Mike Guthrie stepped in front of me and stared into my face. His eyes were flecked with brown and pale green, like a hand-loomed tweed.

Don’t I know you? he asked.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure.”

“You are a London boy, aren’t you?” He had picked up the accent.

“I left Blighty a long time ago, mate,” I grinned, letting it come out broad. He did not smile, and dropped into the seat opposite me, placing his hands on the table top between us, spreading his fingers palm downwards. He continued to stare at me. A very tough baby, very hard.

“I’m afraid that it is too late for today,” I babbled on cheerfully. “If we are going to fish the Mozambique, we have to clear harbour by six o’clock. However, we can make an early start tomorrow-” Materson my chatter. “Check that list out, Fletcher, and let us know what you are short.” He passed me a folded sheet of foolscap, and I glanced down the handwritten column. It was all scuba diving gear and salvage equipment.

“You gentlemen aren’t interested in big game fishing then?” Old Harry showing surprise and amazement at such an unlikely eventuality.

“We have come out to do a little exploring - that’s all.”

I shrugged. “You’re paying, we do what you want to do.”

“Have you got all that stuff?”

“Most of it.” In the offseason I run a cut-rate package deal for scuba buffs which helps pay expenses. I had a full range of diving sets and there was an air compressor built in to Dancer’s engine room for recharging. “I don’t have the air bags or all that rope. “Can you get them?”

“Sure.” Ma Eddy had a pretty good selection of ship’s stores, and Angelo’s old man was a sail-maker. He could run up the air bags in a couple of hours.

“Right then, get it.”

I nodded. “When do you want to start!”

“Tomorrow morning. There will be one other person with us.”

“Did Mr. Coker tell you it’s five hundred dollars a day and I’ll have to charge you for this extra equipment?” Materson inclined his head and made as if to rise.

“Would it be okay to see a little of that out front?” I asked softly, and they froze. I grinned ingratiatingly.

“It’s been a long lean winter, Mr. Materson, and I’ve got to buy this stuff and fill my fuel tanks.”

Materson took out his wallet and counted out three hundred pounds in fivers. As he was doing so he said in his soft purry voice, “We won’t need your crew, Fletcher. The three of us will help you handle the boat.”

I was taken aback. I had not expected that. “They’ll have to draw full wages, if you Jay them off. I can reduce my rate.”

Mike Guthrie was still sitting opposite me, and now he leaned forward. “You heard the man, Fletcher, just get your niggers off the boat,“he said softly.

Carefully I folded the bundle of five-pound notes and buttoned them into my breast pocket, then I looked at him. He was very quick, I could see him tense up ready for me and for the first time he showed expression in those cold speckled eyes. It was anticipation. He knew he had reached me, and he thought I was going to try him. He wanted that, he wanted to take me apart. He left his hands on the table, palms downwards, fingers spreadI thought how I might take the little finger of each hand and snap them at the middle joint like a pair of cheese sticks. I knew I could do it before he had a chance to move, and the knowledge gave me a great deal of pleasure, for I was very angry. I haven’t many friends, but I value the few I have.

“Did you hear me speak, boy?” Guthrie hissed at me, and I dredged up the boyish grin again and let it hang at a ridiculous angle on my face. “Yes, sir, Mr. Guthrie,” I said. “You’re paying the money, whatever you say.”

I nearly choked on the words. He leaned back in his seat, and I saw that he was disappointed. He was muscle, and he enjoyed his work.

I think I knew then that I was going to kill him, and I took enough comfort from the thought to enable me to hold the grin.

Materson was watching us with those bright little eyes. His interest was detached and clinical, like a scientist studying a pair of laboratory specimens. He saw that the confrontation had been resolved for the present, and his voice was soft and purry again.

“Very well, Fletcher.” He moved towards the deck. “Get that equipment together and be ready for us at eight tomorrow morning.$ I let them go, and I sat and finished the beer. It may have been just my hangover, but I was beginning to have a very ugly feeling about this whole charter and I realized that after all it might be best to leave Chubby and Angelo ashore. I went out to tell them.

“We’ve got a pair of freaks, I’m sorry but they have got some big secret and they are dealing you out.” I put the aqualung bottles on the compressor to top up, and we left Dancer at the wharf while I went up to Ma Eddy’s and Angelo and Chubby took my drawing of the air bags across to his father’s workshop.

The bags were ready by four o’clock and I picked them up in the Ford and stowed them in the sail locker under the cockpit seats. Then I spent an hour stripping and reassembling the demand valves of the scubas and checking out all the other diving equipment.

At sundown I ran Dancer out to her moorings on my own, and was about to leave her and row ashore in the dinghy when I had a good thought. I went back into the cabin and knocked back the toggles on the engine-room hatch.

I took the FN carbine from its hiding-place, pumped a cartridge into the breech, set her for automatic fire and clicked on the safety catch before hanging her in the slings again.

Before it was dark, I took my old cast net and waded out across the lagoon towards the main red, I saw the swirl and run beneath the surface of the water which the setting sun had burnished to the colour of copper and. flame, and I sent the net spinning high with a swing of shoulders and arms. It ballooned like a parachute, and fell in a wide circle over the shoal of striped mullet. When I pulled the drag line and closed the net over them, there were five of the big silvery fish as long as my forearm kicking and thumping in the coarse wet folds.

I grilled two of them and ate them on the veranda of my shack. They tasted better than trout from a mountain stream, and afterwards I poured a second whisky and sat On into the dark.

usually this is the time of day when the island enfolds me in a great sense of peace and I seem to understand what the whole business of living is all about. However, that night was not like that. I was angry that these people had come out to the island and brought with them their special brand of poison to contaminate us. Five years ago I had run from that, believing I had found a place that was safe. Yet beneath the anger, when I was honest with myself, I recognized also an excitement, a pleasurable excitement That gut thing again, knowing that I was at risk once more. I was not sure yet what the stakes were, but I knew they were high and that I was sitting in the game with the big boys once again.

I was on the left-hand path again. The path I had chosen at seventeen, when I had deliberately decided against the university bursary which I had been awarded and instead I bunked from St. Stephen’s orphanage in north London and lied about my age to join a whaling factory ship bound for the Antarctic. Down there on the edge of the great ice I lost my last vestige of appetite for the academic life.

When the money I had made in the south ran out I enlisted in a special service battalion where I learned how violence and sudden death could be practised as an art. I practised that art in Malaya and Vietnam, then later in the Congo and Biafra - until suddenly one day in a remote jungle village while the thatched huts burned sending columns of tarry black smoke into an empty brazen sky and the flies came to the dead in humming blue clouds, I was sickened to the depths of my soul I wanted out.

In the South Atlantic I had come to love the sea, and now I wanted a place beside it, with a boat and peace in the long quiet evenings.

First I needed money to buy those things - a great deal of money - so much that the only way I could earn it was in the practice of my art.

One last time, I thought, and I planned it with utmost care. I needed an assistant and I chose a man I had known in the Congo.

Between us we lifted the complete collection of gold coins from the British Museum of Numismatology in Belgrave Square. Three thousand rare gold coins that fitted easily into a medium-sized briefcase, coins of the Roman Caesars and the Emperors of Byzantium, coins of the early states of America and of the English Kings florins and leopards of Edward III, nobles of the Henrys and angels of Edward IV, treble sovereigns and unites, crowns of the rose from the reign of Henry VIII and five-pound pieces of George ill and Victoria - three thousand coins, worth, even on a forced sale, not less than two million dollars.

Then I made my first mistake as a professional crimina I trusted another criminal. When I caught up with my assistant in an Arab hotel in Beirut I reasoned with him in fairly strong terms, and when finally I put the question to him of just what he had done with the briefcase of coins, he snatched a .38 Beretta from under his mattress. In the ensuing scuffle he had his neck broken. It had been a mistake. I didn’t mean to kill the man - but even more I didn’t mean him to kill me. I hung a DON’T DISTurb ” sign on his door and I caught the next plane out. ten days later the police found the briefcase with the coins in the left-luggage department at Paddington Station. it made the front page of all the national newspapers.

I tried again at an exhibition of cut diamonds in Amsterdam, but I had done faulty research on the electronic alarm system and I tripped a beam that I had overlooked.

The plain clothes security guards who had been hired by the organizers of the exhibition rushed headlong into the uniformed police coming in through the main entrance and a spectacular shoot-out ensued, while a completely unarmed Harry Fletcher slunk away into the night to the sound of loud cries and gunfire.

I Was halfway to Schiphol airport by the time a ceasefire was called between the opposing forces of the law - but not before a sergeant of the Dutch police received a critical chest wound. I sat anxiously chewing MY nails anddrinking inumarable beers in my room in the Holiday Inn near Zurich Airport, as I followed the gallant sergeant’s fight for life on the TV set. I would have hated like all hell to have another fatality on my conscience, and I made a solemn vow that if the policeman died I would forget for ever about my place in the sun.

However, the Dutch sergeant rallied strongly and I felt an immense proprietary pride in him when he was finally declared out of danger. And when he was promoted to assistant inspector and awarded a bonus of five thousand crowns I persuaded myself that I was his fairy godfather and that the man owed me eternal gratitude.

Still, I had been shaken by two failures and I took a job as an instructor at an Outward Bound School for six months while I considered my future. At the end of six months, I decided for one more try.

This time I laid the groundwork with meticulous care. I emigrated to South Africa, where I was able with my qualifications to obtain a post as an operator with the security firm responsible for bullion shipments from the South African Reserve Bank in Pretoria to overseas destinations. For a year I worked with the transportation of hundreds of millions of dollars” worth of gold bars, and I studied the system in every minute detail. The weak spot, when I found it, was at Rome - but again I needed help.

This time I went to the professionals, but I set my price at a level that made it easier for them to pay me out than put me down and I covered myself a hundred times against treachery.

It went as smoothly as I had planned it, and this time there were no victims. Nobody came out with a bullet or a cracked skull. We merely switched part of a cargo and substituted leaded cases. Then we moved two and a half tons of gold bars across the Swiss border in a furniture removals van.

In Basie, sitting in a banker’s private rooms furnished with priceless antiques, above the wide swift waters of the Rhine on which the stately white swans rode in majesty, they paid me out. Manny Resnick signed the transfer into my numbered account of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling and he laughed a fat hungry little laugh.

“You’ll be back, Harry - you’ve tasted blood now and you’ll be back. Have a nice holiday, then come to me again when you’ve thought up another deal like this one.”

He was wrong, I never went back. I rode up to Zdrich in a hire car and flew to Paris Orly. In the men’s room there, I shaved off the beard and picked up the briefcase from the pay locker that contained the passport in the name of Harold Delville Fletcher. Then I flew out Panam, for Sydney, Australia.

Wave Dancer cost me one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds sterling and I took her under a deck load of fuel drums across to St. Mary’s, two thousand miles, a voyage on which we learned to love each other.

On St. Mary’s I purchased twenty-five acres of peace, and built the shack with my own hands - four rooms, a thatched roof and a wide veranda, set amongst the Palms above the white beach. Except for the occasions when a night run had been forced upon me, I had walked the right-hand Path since then.

it was late when I had done my reminiscences and the tide was pushing high up the beach in the moonlight before I went into the shack, but then I slept like an innocent.

They were on time the following morning. Charly Materson ran a tight outfit. The taxi deposited them at the head of the Wharf while I had Dancer singled up at stern and stern and both engines burbling sweetly.

I watched them come, concentrating on the third member of the group. He was not what I had expected. He was tall and lean with a wide friendly face and dark soft hair. Unlike the others, his face and arms were darkly suntanned, and his teeth were large and very white. He wore denim shorts and a white sweatshirt and he had a swimmer’s wide rangy shoulders and powerful arms. I knew instantly who was to use the diving equipment.

He carried a big green canvas kitbag over one shoulder. He carried it easily, though I could see that it was weighty, and he chatted gaily with his two companions who answered him in monosyllables. They flanked him like a pair of guards.

He looked up at me as they came level and I saw that he was young and eager. There was an excitement, an anticipation, about him, that reminded me sharply of myself ten years previously.

“Hi,” he grinned at me, an easy friendly grin, and I realized that he was an extremely good-looking youngster. “Greetings,” I replied, liking him from the first and intrigued as to how he had found a place with the wolf pack. Under my direction they took in the mooring lines and, from this brief exercise, I learned that the youngster was the only one of them familiar with small boats.

As we cleared the harbour, he and Materson came up on to the flying bridge. Materson had coloured slightly and his breathing was raggedy from the mild exertion. He introduced the newcomer.

“This is Jimmy,” he told me, when he had caught his breath. We shook hands and I put his age at not much over twenty. Close up I had no cause to revise my first impressions. He had a level and innocent gaze from seagrey eyes, and his grip was firm and dry.

“She’s a darling boat, skipper,” he told me, which was rather like telling a mother that her baby is beautiful.

“She’s not a bad old girl.”

“What is she, forty-four, forty-five feet?” “Forty-five,” I said, liking him a little more.

“Jimmy will give you your directions,” Materson told me. “You will follow his orders.” “Fine,” I said, and Jimmy coloured a little under his tan. “Not orders, Mr. Fletcher, I’ll just tell you where we want to go. “Fine, Jim, I’ll take you there.”

“Once we are clear of the island, will you turn due west.”

“Just how far in that direction do you intend going?” I asked.

“We want to cruise along the coast of the African mainland,” Materson. cut in.

“Lovely,” I said, “that’s great. Did anybody tell you that they don’t hang out the welcome mat for strangers there?”

“We will stay well offshore.” I thought a moment, hesitating before turning back to Admiralty Wharf and packing the whole bunch ashore-* “Where do you want to go - north or south of the rivermouth?” North said Jimmy, and that altered the proposition for the good.

South of the river they patrolled with helicopters and were very touchy about their territorial waters. I would not go in there during daylight.

In the north there was little coastal activity. There was a single crash boat at Zinballa, but when its engines were in running order, which was a few days a week, then its crew were mostly blown out of their minds with the virulent palm liquor brewed locally along the coast. When crew and engines were functioning simultaneously, they could raise fifteen knots, and Dancer could turn on twenty-two any time I asked her.

The final trick in my favour was that I could run Dancer through the maze of’offshore reefs and islands on a dark night in a roaring monsoon, while it was my experience that the crash boat commander avoided this sort of extravagance. Even on a bright sunny day and in a flat calm, he preferred rhe quiet and peace of Zinballa Bay. I had heard that he suffered acutely from sea sickness, and held his present appointment only because it was far away from the capital, where as a minister of the government the commander had been involved in a little unpleasantness regarding the disappearance of large amounts of foreign aid.

From my point of view he was the ideal man for the job.

“All right,” I agreed, turning to Materson. “But I’m afraid what you’re asking is going to cost you another two-fifty dollars a day - danger money.”

“I was afraid it might,“he said softly.

I brought Dancer around, close to the light on Oyster Point.

It was a bright morning with a high clear sky into which the stationary clouds that marked the position of eacch group of islands towered in great soft columns of blinding white.

The solemn Progress of the trade winds across the ocean was interrupted by the bulwark of the African continent on which they broke. We were getting the backlash here in the inshore channel, and random squalls and gusts of it spread darkly across the pale green waters and flecked the surface chop with white. Dancer loved it, it gave her an excuse to flounce and swish her bottom.

“You looking for anything special - or just looking?” I asked casually, and Jimmy turned to tell me all about it. He was itchy with excitement, and the grey eyes sparkled as he opened his mouth.

“Just looking,” Materson interrupted with a ring in his voice and a sharp warning in his expression, and Jimmy’s mouth closed.

“I know these waters. I know every island, every reef. I might be able to save you a lot of time - and a bit of money.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Materson thanked me with heavy irony.

“However, I believe we can manage.”

“You are paying,” I shrugged, and Materson. glanced at Jimmy, inclined his head in a command to follow and led him down into the cockpit. They stood together beside the stern rail and Materson spoke to him quietly but earnestly for two minutes. I saw Jimmy flush darkly, his expression changing from dismay to boyish sulks and I guessed that he was having his ear chewed to ribbons on the subject of secrecy and security.

When he came back on to the flying bridge he was seething with anger, and for the first time I noticed the strong hard line of his jaw. He wasn’t just a pretty boy, I decided.

Evidently on Materson’s orders, Guthrie, the muscle, came out of the cabin and swung the big padded fighting chair to face the bridge. He lounged in it, even in his relaxation charged-with the promise of violence like a resting leopard, and he watched us, one leg draped over the arm rest and the linen jacket with the heavy weight in its pocket folded in his lap.

A happy ship, I chuckled, and ran Dancer out through the islands, threading a fine course through the clear green waters where the reefs lurked darkly below the surface like malevolent monsters and the islands were fringed with coral sand as dazzling white as a snowdrift, and crowned with dark thick vegetation over which the palm stems curved gracefully, their tops shaking in the feeble remnants of the trade.

It was a long day as we cruised at random and I tried to get some hint of the object of the expedition. However, still smarting from Materson’s reprimand, Jimmy was tight mouthed and grim. He asked for changes of course at intervals, after I had pointed out our position on the large, scale admiralty chart which he produced from his bag.

Although there were no extraneous markings on his chart, when I examined it surreptitiously I was able to figure that we were interested in an area fifteen to thirty miles north of the multiple mouths of the Rovuma River, and up to sixteen miles offshore. An area containing perhaps three hundred islands varying in size from a few acres to many square miles - a very big haystack in which to find his needle.

I was content enough to perch up on Dancer’s bridge and run quietly along the seaways, enjoying the feet of my darling under me and watching the activity of the sea animals, and birds.

In the fighting chair Mike Guthrie’s scalp started to show through the thin cover of hair like strips of scarlet neon lighting.

Cook, you bastard,” I thought happily, and neglected to warn him about the tropical sun until we were running home in the dusk. The next day he was in agony with white goo smeared over his bloated and incarnadined features and a wide cloth hat covering his head, but his face flashed like the port light of an ocean-goer.

By noon on the second day I was bored. Jimmy was poor company for although he had recovered a little of his good humour he was so conscious of security that he even thought for thirty seconds before accepting an offer of coffee.

It was more for something to do than because I wanted fish for my dinner that when I saw a squadron of small kingfish charging a big shoal of sardine ahead of us, I gave the wheel to Jimmy.

“Just keep her on that heading,” I told him and dropped down into the cockpit. Guthrie watched me warily from his swollen crimson face as I glanced into the cabin and saw that Materson had my bar open and was mixing himself a gin and tonic. At seven hundred and fifty a day I didn’t grudge it to him. He hadn’t emerged from the cabin in two days.

I went back to the small tackle locker and selected a pair of feather jigs and tossed them out. As we crossed the track of the shoal I hit a kingfish and brought him out kicking, flashing golden in the sun.

Then I recoiled the lines and stowed them, wiped the blade of my heavy baitknife across the oil stone to brighten up the edge and split the kingfishs belly from anal vent to gills and pulled out a handful of bloody gut to throw it into the wake.

Immediately a pair of gulls that had been weaving and hovering over us screeched with greed and plunged for the scraps. Their excitement summoned others and within minutes there was a shrieking, flapping host of them astern of us.

Their din was not so loud that it covered the metallic snicker close behind me, the unmistakable sound of the slide on an automatic pistol being drawn back and released to load and cock. I moved entirely from instinct. Without thought, the big baitknife spun in my right hand as I changed smoothly to a throwing grip and I turned and dropped to the deck in a single movement, breaking fall with heels and left arm as the knife went back over my right shoulder and I began the throw at the instant that I lined up the target.

Mike Guthrie had a big automatic in his right hand. An old-fashioned naval .45, a killer’s weapon, one which would blow a hole in a man’s chest through which you could drive a London cab.

TWO things saved Guthrie from being pinned to the back of the fighting chair by the longheavy blade of the baitknife. Firstly, the fact that the .45 was not pointed at me and, secondly, the expression of comical amazement on the man’s scarlet face.

I prevented myself from throwing the knife, breaking the instinctive action by a major effort of will, and we stared at each other. He knew then how close he had come, and the grin he forced to his swollen sunburned lips was shaky and unconvincing. I stood up and pegged the knife into the bait chopping board.

“Do yourself a favour,” I told him quietly. “Don’t play with that thing behind my back.”

He laughed then, blustering and tough again. He swivelled the seat and aimed out over the stern. He fired twice, the shots crashing out loudly above the run of Dancer’s engines and the brief smell of cordite was whipped away on the wind.

Two of the milling gulls exploded into grotesque bursts of blood and feathers blown to shreds by the heavy bullets, and the rest of the flock scattered with shrieks of panic. The manner in which the birds were torn up told me that Guthrie had loaded with explosive bullets, a more savage weapon than a sawn-off shotgun.

He swivelled the chair back to face me and blew into the muzzle of the pistol like John Wayne. It was fancy shooting with that heavy calibre weapon.

“Tough cooky,” I applauded him, and turned to the bridge ladder, but Materson was standing in the doorway of the cabin with the gin in his hand and as I stepped past him he spoke quietly.

“Now I know who you are,” he said, in that soft putty voice.

“It’s been worrying us, we thought we knew you.”

I stared at him, and he called past me to Guthrie.

“You know who he is now, don’t you?” and Guthrie shook his head.

I don’t think he could trust his voice. “He had a beard then, think about it - a mug shot photograph.”

“Jesus,” said Guthrie. “Harry Bruce!” I felt a little shock at hearing the name spoken out loud again after all these years. I had hoped it was forgotten for ever.

“Rome,” said Materson. “The gold heist.”

“He set it up.” Guthrie snapped his fingers. “I was sure I knew him. It was the beard that fooled me.”

“I think you gentlemen have the wrong address,” I said with a desperate attempt at a cool tone, but was thinking quickly, trying to weigh this fresh knowledge. They had seen a mugshot - where? When? Were they law men of from the other side of the fence? I needed time to think and I clambered up to the bridge.

“Sorry,” muttered Jimmy, as I took the wheel from him. “I should have told you he had a gun.” “Yeah,” I said. “it might have helped.” My mind was racing, and the first turning it took was along the left-hand path. They would have to go. They had blown my elaborate cover, they had sniffed me out and there was only one sure way. I looked back into the cockpit but both Materson and Guthrie had gone below.

An accident, take them both out at one stroke, aboard a small boat there were plenty of ways a greenhorn could get hurt in the worst possible way. They had to go.

Then I looked at Jimmy, and he grinned at me.

“You move fast,” he said. “Mike nearly wet himself, he thought he was going to get that knife through his gizzard.”

The kid also? I asked myself - if I took out the other two, he would have to go as well. Then suddenly I felt the same physical nausea that I had first known long ago in the Biaftan village.

“You okay, skipper?” Jimmy asked quickly, it had shown on my face.

“I’m okay, Jim,” I said. “Why don’t you go fetch us a can of beer.”

While he was below I reached my decision. I would do a deal. I was certain that they didn’t want their business shouted in the streets. I’d trade secrecy for secrecy. Probably they were coming to the same conclusion in the cabin below.

I locked the wheel and crossed quietly to the corner of the bridge, making sure my footsteps were not picked up in the cabin below.

The ventilator there funnels fresh air into the inlet above the saloon table. I had found that the ventilator made a reasonably effective voice tube, that sound was carried through it to the bridge.

However, the effectiveness of this listening device depends on a number of factors, chief of these being the direction and strength of the wind and the precise position of the speaker in the cabin below.

The wind was on our beam, gusting into the opening of the ventilator and blotting out patches of the conversation in the cabin. However, Jimmy must have been standing directly below the vent for his voice came through strongly when the wind roar did not smother it.

“Why don’t you ask him now?” and the reply was confused, then the wind gusted and when it cleared, Jimmy was speaking again.

“If you do it tonight, where will you-2 and the wind roared, ” - to get the dawn light then we will have to Then entire discussion seemed to be on times and places, and as I wondered briefly what they hoped to gain by leaving harbour at dawn, he said it again. “If the dawn light is where-” I strained for the next words but the wind killed them for ten seconds, then ” - I dont see why we can’t—2 Jimmy was protesting and suddenly Mike Guthrie’s voice came through sharp and hard. He must have gone to stand close beside Jimmy, probably in a threatening attitude.

“Listen, Jimmy boy, you let us handle that side of it. Your job is to find the bloody thing, and you aren’t doing so good this far.”

They must have moved again for their voices became indistinct and I heard the sliding door into the cockpit opening and I turned quickly to the wheel and freed the retaining handle just as Jimmy’s head appeared over the edge of the deck as he came up the ladder.

He handed me the beer and he seemed to be more relaxed now. The reserve was gone from his manner. He smiled at me, friendly and trusting.

“Mr. Materson says that’s enough for today. We are to head for home.”

I swung Dancer across the current and we came in from the west, past the mouth of Turtle Bay and I could see my shack standing amongst the palms. I felt a sudden chilling premonition of loss. The fates had called for a new deck of cards, and the game was bigger, the stakes were too rich for my blood but there was no way I could pull out now.

However, I suppressed the chill of despair, and turned to Jimmy.

I would take advantage of his new attitude of trust and try for what information I could glean.

We chatted lightly on the run down the channel into Grand Harbour.

They had obviously told him that I was off the leper list. Strangely the fact that I had a criminal past made me more acceptable to the wolf pack. They could reckon the angles now. They had found a lever, so now they could handle me - though I was pretty sure they had not explained the whole proposition to young James.

It was obviously a relief for him to act naturally with me. He was a friendly and open person, completely lacking in guile. An example of this was the way that his surname had been guarded like a military secret from me, and yet around his neck he wore a silver chain and a Medic-alert tag that warned that J.A. NORTH, the wearer, was allergic to penicillin.

Now he forgot all his former reserve, and gently I drew small snippets of information from him that I might have use for in the-future. In my experience it’s what you don’t know that can really hurt you, I chose the subject that I guessed would open him up completely.

“See that reef across the channel, there where she’s breaking now?

That’s Devil Fish Reef and there is twenty fathoms sheer under the sea side of her. It’s a hangout of some real big old bull grouper. I shot one there last year that weighed in at over two hundred kilos.”

“Two hundred-” he exclaimed. “My God, that’s almost four hundred and fifty pounds.”

“Right, you could put your head and shoulders in his mouth.”

The last of his reserves disappeared. He had been reading history and philosophy at Cambridge but spent too much time in the sea, and had to drop out. Now he ran a small diving equipment supply company and underwater salvage outfit, that gave him a living and allowed him to dive most days of the week. He did private work and had contracted to the Government and the Navy on some jobs.

More than once he mentioned the name “Sherry” and I probed carefully.

“Girl friend or wife?” and he grinned.

“Sister, big sister, but she’s a doll - she does the books and minds the shop, all that stuff,” in a tone that left no doubt as to what James thought about book-keeping and counter-jumping. “She’s a red-hot conchologist and she makes two thousand a year out of her sea shells.” But he didn’t explain how he had got into the dubious company he was now keeping, nor what he was doing halfway around the world from his sports shop. I left them on Admiralty Wharf, and took Dancer over to the Shell Basin for refuelling before dark.

That evening I grilled the kingfish over the coals, roasted a couple of big sweet yams in their jackets and was washing it down with a cold beer sitting on the veranda of the shack and listening to the surf when I saw the headlights coming down through the palm trees. The taxi parked beside my pickup, and the driver stayed at the wheel while his passengers came up the steps on to the stoep. They had left James at the Hilton, and there were just the two of them now - Materson and Guthrie.

“Drink?” I indicated the bottles and ice on the side table.

Guthrie poured gin for both of them and Materson sat opposite me and watched me finish the last of the fish.

“I made a few phone calls,” he said when I pushed my plate away.

“And they tell me that Harry Bruce disappeared in June five years ago and hasn’t been heard of since. I asked around and found out that Harry Fletcher sailed into Grand Harbour here three months later - inward bound from Sydney, Australia.”

“Is that the truth?” I picked a little fish bone out of my tooth, and lit a long black island cheroot.

one other thing, someone who knew him well tells me Harry Bruce had a knife scar across his left arm,” he purred, and I involuntarily glanced at the thin line of scar tissue that laced the muscle of my forearm. It had shrunk and flattened with the years, but was still very white against the dark sunbrowned skin.

“Now that’s a hell of a coincidence,” I said, and drew on the cheroot. It was strong and aromatic, tasting of sea and sun and spices. I wasn’t worried now - they were going to make a deal.

“Yeah, isn’t it,” Materson agreed, and he looked around him elaborately. “You got a nice set-up here, Fletcher. Cosy, isn’t it, really nice and COSY.

“It beats hell out of working for a living,” I admitted. Or out of breaking rocks, or sewing mail bags.”

“I should imagine it does.”

“The kid is going to ask you some questions tomorrow. Be nice to him, Fletcher. When we go you can forget you ever saw us, and we’ll forget to tell anybody about that funny coincidence.”

“Mr. Materson, sir, I’ve got a terrible memory,” I assured him.

After the conversation I had overheard in Dancer’s cabin, I expected them to ask for an early start time the following morning, for the dawn light seemed important to their plans. However, neither of them mentioned it, and when they had gone I knew I wouldn’t sleep so I walked out along the sand around the curve of the bay to Mutton Point to watch the moon come up through the palm trees. I sat there until after midnight.

The dinghy was gone from the jetty but Hambone, the ferry man, rowed me out to Dancer’s moorings before sun-up the following morning and as we came alongside I saw the familiar shape shambling around the cockpit, and the dinghy tied alongside.

“Hey, Chubby.” I jumped aboard. “Your Missus kick you out of bed, then?”

Dancer’s deck was gleaming white even in the bad light, and all the metal work was brightly burnished. He must have been at it for a -couple of hours; Chubby loves Dancer almost as much as I do.

“She looked like a public shit-house, Harry,” he grumbled.

“That’s a sloppy bunch you got aboard,” and he spat noisily over the side. “No respect for a boat, that’s what.”

He had coffee ready for me, as strong and as pungent as only he can make it, and we drank it sitting in the saloon.

Chubby frowned heavily into his mug and blew on the steaming black liquid. He wanted to tell me something. “How’s Angelo?”

“Pleasuring the Rawano widows,” he growled. The island does not provide sufficient employment for all its able, bodied young men - so most of them ship out on three-year labour contracts to the American satellite tracking station and airforce base on Rawano, island. They leave their young wives behind, the Rawano widows, and the island girls are justly celebrated for the high temperature of their blood and their friendly dispositions.

“That Angelo’s going to shag his brain loose, he’s been at it night and day since Monday.”

I detected more than a trace of envy in his growl. Missus Chubby kept him on a pretty tight lead - he sipped noisily at the coffee.

“How’s your party, Harry?”

“Their money is good.”

“You not fishing, Harry.” He looked at me. “I watch you from Coolie Peak, man, you don’t go near the channel you are working inshore.”

“That’s right, Chubby.” He returned his attention to his coffee.

“Hey, Harry. You watch them. You be good and careful, hear.

They bad men, those two. I don’t know the young one - but the others they are bad.”

“I’ll be careful, Chubby.”

“You know the new girl at the hotel, Marion? The one over for the season?” I nodded, she was a pretty slim little wisp of a girl with lovely long legs, about nineteen with glossy black hair, freckled skin, bold eyes and an impish smile. “Well, last night she went with the blond one, the one with the red face.” I knew that Marion sometimes combined business with pleasure and provided for selected hotel guests services beyond the call of duty. On the island this sort of activity drew no social stigma.

“Yes,” I encouraged Chubby.

“He hurt her, Harry. Hurt her bad.” Chubby took another mouthful of coffee. “Then he paid her so much money she couldn’t go to the police.”

I liked Mike Guthrie a little less now. Only an animal would take advantage of a girl like Marion. I knew her well. She had an innocence, a childlike acceptance of life that made her promiscuity strangely appealing. I remembered how I had thought I might have to kill Guthrie one day and tried not to let the thought perish.

“They are bad men, Harry. I thought it best you know that.”

“Thanks, Chubby.”

“And don’t you let them dirty up Dancer like that,” he added accusingly. “The saloon and deck - they were like a pigsty, man.”

He helped me run Dancer across to Admiralty Wharf and then he set off homewards, grumbling and muttering blackly. He passed Jimmy coming in the opposite direction and shot him a single malevolent glance that should have shrivelled him in his tracks.

Jimmy was on his own, fresh-faced and jaunty.

“Hi, skipper,“he called, as he jumped down on to Dancer’s deck, and I went into the saloon with him and poured coffee for us.

“Mr. Materson says you have some questions for me, is that right?”

“Look, Mr. Fletcher, I want you to know that I didn’t mean offence by not talking to you before. It wasn’t me but the others.” “Sure,” I said. “That’s fine, Jimmy.”

“It would have been the sensible thing to ask your help long ago, instead of blundering around the way we have been. Anyway, now the others have suddenly decided it’s okay.” He had just told me much more than he imagined, and I adjusted my opinion of Master James. It was clear that he possessed information, and he had not shared it with the others. It was his insurance, and he had probably insisted on seeing me alone to keep his insurance policy intact.

“Skipper, we are looking for an island, a specific island. I can’t tell you why, I’m sorry.”

“Forget it, Jimmy. That’s all right.” What will there be for you, James North, I wondered suddenly. What will the wolf pack have for you once you have led them to this special island of yours? Will it be something a lot less pleasant than penicillin allergy?

I looked at that handsome young face, and felt an unaccustomed flood of affection for him - perhaps it was his youth and innocence, the sense of excitement with which he viewed this tired and wicked old world. I envied and liked him for that, and I did not relish seeing him pulled down and rolled in the dirt.

“Jim, how well do you know your friends?” I asked him quietly, and he was taken by surprise, then almost immediately he was wary.

“Well enough,“he replied carefully. “Why?”

“You have known them less than a month,” I said as though I knew, and saw the confirmation in his expression. “And I have known men like that all my life!

“I don’t see what this has to do with it, Mr. Fletcher.” He was stiffening up now, I was treating him like a child and he didn’t like that.

“Listen, Jim. Forget this business, whatever it is. Drop it, and go back to your shop and your salvage company-” “That’s crazy,” he said. “You don’t understand.”

“I understand, Jim. I really do. I travelled the same road, and I know it well.”

“I can look after myself Don’t worry about me.” He had flushed up under his tan, and the grey eyes snapped with defiance. We stared at each other for a few moments, and I knew I was wasting time and emotion. If anyone had spoken like this to me at the same age I would have thought him senile.

“All right, Jim,” I said. “I’ll drop it, but you know the score.

just play it cool and loose, that’s all.”

“Okay, Mr. Fletcher.” He relaxed slowly, and then grinned a charming and engaging grin. “Thanks anyway.”

“Let’s hear about this island,” I suggested and he glanced about the cabin.

“Let’s go up on the bridge,” he suggested, and out in the open air he took a stub of pencil and a scrap pad from the map bin above the chart table.

“I reckon it lies off the African shore about six to ten miles, and ten to thirty miles north of the mouth of the Rovuma River. -“

“That covers a hell of a lot of ground, Jim - as you may have noticed during the last few days. What else do you know about it?”

He hesitated a little longer, before grudgingly doling out a few more coins from his hoard. He took the pencil and drew a horizontal line across the pad.

“Sea level.” he said, and then above the line he raised an irregular profile that started low, and -then climbed steeply into three distinct peaks before ending abruptly, ” and that’s the silhouette that it shows from the sea. The three hills are volcanic basalt, sheer rock with little vegetation!

“The Old Men-” I recognized it immediately, you are a long way out in your other calculations, it’s more like twenty miles offshore-“

“But within sight of the mainland?” he asked quickly. “it has to be within sight.”

“Sure, you could see a long way from the tops of the hills,” I pointed out as he tore the sheet from the pad and carefully ripped it to shreds, and dropped them into the harbour.

“How far north of the river?” He turned back to face me.

“Offhand I’d say sixty or seventy miles,” and he looked thoughtful.

“Yes, it could be that far north. It could fit, it depends on how long it would take ” He did not finish, he was taking my advice about playing it cool. “Can you take us there, skip? I nodded. “But it’s a long run and best come prepared to sleep on the boat overnight.” “I’ll fetch the others,” he said, eager and excited once more.

But on the wharf he looked back at the bridge.

“About the island, what it looks like and all that, don’t discuss it with the others, okay?”

“Okay, Jim,” I smiled back at him. “Off you go.” I went down to have a look at the admiralty chart. The Old Men were the highest point on a ridge of basalt, a long hard reef that ran parallel to the mainland for two hundred miles. It disappeared below the water, but reappeared at intervals, formirig a regular feature amongst the haphazard sprinkling of coral and sand islands and shoals.

It was marked as uninhabited and waterless, and the soundings showed a number of deep channels through the reefs around it. Although it was far north of my regular grounds, yet I had visited the area the previous year as host to a marine biology expedition from UCLA who were studying the breeding habits of the green turtles that abounded there.

We had camped for three days on another island across the tide channel from the Old Men, where there was an all-weather anchorage in an enclosed lagoon, and brackish but just drinkable water in a fisherman’s well amongst the palms. Looking across from the anchorage, the Old Men showed exactly the outline that Jimmy had sketched for me, that was how I had recognized it so readily.

Half an hour later, the whole party arrived; strapped on the roof of the taxi was a bulky piece of equipment covered with a green canvas dust sheet. They hired a couple of lounging islanders to carry this, and the overnight bags they had with them, down the wharf to where I was waiting.

They stowed the canvas package on the foredeck without unwrapping it and I asked no questions. Guthrie’s face was starting to fall off in layers of sun-scorched skin, leaving wet red flesh exposed. He had smeared white cream over it. I thought of him slapping little Marion around his suite at the Hilton, and I smiled at him.

“You look so good, have you ever thought of running for Miss. Universe?” and he glowered at me from beneath the brim of his hat as he took his seat in the fighting chair. During the run northwards he drank beer straight from the can and used the empties as targets. Firing the big pistol at them as they tumbled and bobbed in Dancer’s wake.

A little before noon, I gave Jimmy the wheel and went down to use the heads below deck. I found that Materson had the bar open and the gin bottle out.

“How much longer?” he asked, sweaty and flushed despite the air-conditioning.

“Another hour or so,” I told him, and thought that Materson was going to find himself with a drinking problem the way he handled spirits at midday. However, the gin had mellowed him a little and - always the opportunist - I loosened another three hundred pounds from his wallet as an advance against my fees before going up to take Dancer in on the last leg through the northern tide channel that led to the Old Men.

The triple peaks came up through the heat haze, ghostly grey and ominous, seeming to hang disembodied above the channel.

Jimmy was examining the peaks through his binoculars, and then he lowered them and turned delightedly to me. “That looks like it, skipper,” and he clambered down into the cockpit. The three of them went up on to the foredeck, passed the canvas-wrapped deck cargo, and stood shoulder to shoulder at the rail staring through the sea fret at the island as I crept cautiously up the channel.

We had a rising tide pushing us up the channel, and I agreed to use it to approach the eastern tip of the Old Men, and make a landing on the beach below the nearest peak. This coast has a tidal fall of seventeen feet at full springs, and it is unwise to go into shallow water on the ebb. It is easy to find yourself stranded high and dry as the water falls away beneath your keel.

Jimmy borrowed my hand-bearing compass and packed it with his chart, a Thermos of iced water and a bottle of salt tablets from the medicine chest into his haversack. While I crept cautiously in towards the beach, Jimmy and Materson stripped off their footwear and trousers.

When Dancer bumped her keel softly on the hard white sand of the beach I shouted to them.

“Okay - over you go,” and with Jimmy leading, they went down the ladder I had rigged from Dancer’s side. The water came to their armpits, and James held the haversack above his head as they waded towards the beach.

“Two hours” I called after them. “If you’re longer than that you can sleep ashore. I’m not coming in to pick you up on the ebb.”

Jimmy waved and grinned. I put Dancer into reverse and backed off cautiously, while the two of them reached the beach and hopped around awkwardly as they donned their trousers and shoes and then set off into the palm groves and disappeared from view.

After circling for ten minutes and peering down through the water that was clear as a trout stream, I picked up the dark shadow across the bottom that I was seeking and dropped a light head anchor.

While Guthrie watched with interest I put on a faceplate and gloves and went over the side with a small oyster net and a heavy tyre lever. There was forty feet of water under us, and I was pleased to find my wind was still sufficient to allow me to go down and prise loose a netful of the big double-shelled sun clams in one dive. I shucked them on the foredeck, and then, mindful of Chubby’s admonitions, I threw the empty shells overboard and swabbed the deck carefully before taking a pailful of the sweet flesh down to the galley. They went into a casserole pot with wine and garlic, salt and ground pepper and just a bite of chilli. I set the gas-plate to simmer and put the lid on the pot.

When I went back on deck, Guthrie was still in the fighting chair.

“What’s wrong, big shot, are you bored?” I asked solicitously.

“No little girls to kick around?” His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. I could see him checking out my source of information.

“You’ve got a big mouth, Bruce. Somebody is going to close it for you one day.” We exchanged a few more pleasantries, none of them much above this level, but it served to pass the time until the two distant figures appeared on the beach and waved and halloed. I pulled up the hook, and went in to pick them up.

Immediately they were aboard, they called Guthrie to them and assembled on the foredeck for one of their group sessions. They were all excited, Jimmy the most so, and he gesticulated and pointed out into the channel, talking quietly but vehemently. For once they seemed all to be in agreement, but by the time they had finished talking there was an hour of sunlight left and I refused to agree to Materson’s demands that I should continue our explorations that evening. I had no wish to creep around in the darkness on an ebb tide.

Firmly I took Dancer across to the safe anchorage in the lagoon across the channel, and by the time the sun went down below a blazing horizon I had Dancer riding peacefully on two heavy anchors, and I was sitting up on the bridge enjoying the last of the day and the first Scotch of the evening. In the saloon below me there was the interminable murmur of discussion and speculation. I ignored it, not even bothering to use the ventilator, until the first mosquitoes found their way across the lagoon and began whining around my ears. I went below and the conversation dried up at my entry.

I thickened the juice and served my clam casserole with baked yams and pineapple salad and they ate in dedicated silence.

“My God, that is even better than my sister’s cooking,” Jimmy gasped finally. I grinned at him. I am rather vain about my culinary skills and young James was clearly a gourmet.

I woke after midnight and went up on deck to check Dancer’s moorings. She was all secure and I paused to enjoy the moonlight.

A great stillness lay upon the night, disturbed only by the soft chuckle of the tide against Dancer’s side - and far off the boom of the surf on the outer reef. It was coming in big and tall from the open ocean, and breaking in thunder and white upon the coral of Gunfire Reef The name was well chosen, and the deep belly-shaking thump of it sounded exactly like the regular salute of a minute gun.

The moonlight washed the channel with shimmering silver and highlighted the bald domes of the peaks of the Old Men so they shone like ivory. Below them the night mists rising from the lagoon writhed and twisted like tormented souls.

Suddenly I caught the whisper of movement behind me and I whirled to face it. Guthrie had followed me as silently as a hunting leopard. He wore only a pair of jockey shorts and his body was white and muscled and lean in the moonlight. He carried the big black .45, dangling at arm’s length by his right thigh. We stared at each other for a moment before I relaxed.

“You know, luv, you’ve just got to give up now. You really aren’t my type at all,” I told him, but there was adrenalin in my blood and my voice rasped.

“When the time comes to rim you, Fletcher, I’ll be using this,“he said, and lifted the automatic, “all the way up, boy,” and he grinned.

We ate breakfast before sun-up and I took my mug of coffee to the bridge to drink as we ran up the channel towards the open sea. Materson was below, and Guthrie lolled in the fighting chair. Jimmy stood beside me and explained his requirements for this day.

He was tense with excitement, seeming to quiver with it like a young gundog with the first scent of the bird in his nostrils.

“I want to get some shots off the peaks of the Old Men,” he explained. “I want to use your hand-bearing compass, and I’ll call you in.”

“Give me your bearings, Jim, and I’ll plot it and put you on the spot,” I suggested.

“Let’s do it my way, skipper,” he replied awkwardly, and I could not prevent a flare of irritation in my reply.

“All right, then, eagle scout.” He flushed and went to the port rail to sight the peaks through the lens of the compass. It was ten minutes or so before he spoke again.

“Can we turn about two points to port now, skipper?”

“Sure we can,” I grinned at him, “but, of course, that would pile us on to the end of Gunfire Reef - and we’d tear her belly out.”

it took another two hours of groping about through the maze of reefs before I had worked Dancer out through the channel into the open sea and circled back to approach Gunfire Reef from the east.

it was like the child’s game of hunt the thimble; Jimmy called “hotter” and “colder” without supplying me with the two references that would enable me to place Dancer on the precise spot he was seeking.

Out here the swells marched in majestic procession towards the land, growing taller and more powerful as they felt the shelving bottom. Dancer rolled and swung to them as we edged in towards the outer reef.

Where the swells met the barrier of coral their dignity turned to sudden fury, and they boiled up and burst in leviathan spouts of spray, pouring wildly over the coral with the explosive shock of impact. “Then they sucked back, exposing the evil black fangs, white water cascading and creaming from the barrier, while the next swell moved UP, humping its great slick back for the next assault.

Jimmy was directing me steadily southwards in a gradual converging course with the reef, and I could tell we were very close to his marks. Through the compass he squinted eagerly, first at one and then the other peak of the Old Men.

“Steady as you go, skipper,” he called. “Just ease her down on that heading.”

I looked ahead, tearing my eyes away from the menacing coral for a few seconds, and I watched the next swell charge in and break - except at a narrow point five hundred yards ahead. Here the swell kept its shape and ran on uninterrupted towards the land. On each side, the swell broke on coral, but just at that one point it was open.

Suddenly I remembered Chubby’s boast.

“I was just nineteen when I pulled my first jewfish out of the hole at Gunfire Break. Weren’t no other would fish with me - don’t say as I blame them. Wouldn’t go into the Break again - got a little more brains now.”

Gunfire Break, suddenly I knew that was where we were heading. I tried to remember exactly what Chubby had told me about it.

“If you come in from the sea about two hours before high water, steer for the oentre of the gap until you come up level with a big old head of brain coral on your starboard side, you’ll know it when you see it, pass it close as you can and then come round hard to starboard and you’ll be sitting in a big hole tucked in neatly behind the main reef. Closer you are on the back of the reef the better, man-” I remembered it clearly then, Chubby in his talkative phase in the public bar of the Lord Nelson, boastful as one of the very few men who had been through the Gunfire Break. No anchor going to hold you there, you got to lean on the oars to hold station in the gap - the hole at Gunfire Break is deep, man, deep, but the jewfish in there are big, man, big. One day I took four fish, and the smallest was three hundred pounds. Could have took more - but time was up. You can’t stay in Gunfire Break more than an hour after high water - she sucks out through the Break like they pulled the chain on the whole damned sea. You come out the same way you went in, only you pray just a little harder on the way out —,“cos you got a ton of fish on board, and ten feet less water under your keel. There is another way out through a channel in the back of the reef But I don’t even like to talk about that one. Only tried it once.”

Now we were bearing down directly on the Break, Jimmy was going to run us right into the eye of it.

“Okay, Jim,” I called. “That’s as far as we go.” I opened the throttle and sheered off, making a good offing before turning back to face Jimmy’s wrath.

“We were almost there, damn you,” he blustered. “We could have gone in a little closer.”

“You having trouble up there, boy?” Guthrie shouted up from the cockpit.

“No, it’s all right,” Jimmy called back, and then turned furiously to me. “You are under contract, Mr. Fletcher!

“I want to show you something, James, and I took him to the chart table. The Break was marked on the admiralty chart by a single laconic sounding of thirty fathoms, there was no name or sailing instruction for it. Quickly I pencilled in the bearings of the two extreme peaks of the Old Men from the break, and then used the protractor to measure the angle they subtended.

“That right?” I asked him, and he stared at my figures.

“It’s right, isn’t it?” I insisted and then reluctantly he nodded.. ”

“Yes, that’s the spot,” he agreed, and I went on to tell him about Gunfire Break in every detail.

“But we have to get in there,” he said at the end of my speech, as though he had not heard a word of it.

“No way,” I told him. “The only place I’m interested in now is Grand Harbour, St. Mary’s Island,” and I laid Dancer on that course. As far as I was concerned the charter was over.

Jimmy disappeared down the ladder, and returned within minutes with reinforcements - Materson and Guthrie, both of them looking angry and outraged.

“Say the word, and I’ll tear the bastard’s arm off and beat him to death with the wet end,” Mike Guthrie said with relish.

“The kid says you pulling out?” Materson wanted to know. “Now that’s not right - is it?” I explained once more about the hazards of Gunfire Break and they sobered immediately.

“Take me close as you can - I’ll swim in the rest of the way,” Jimmy asked me, but I replied directly to Materson. “You’d lose him, for certain sure. Do you want to risk that?”

He didn’t answer, but I could see that Jimmy was much too valuable for them to take the chance.

“Let me try,” Jimmy insisted, but Materson shook his head irritably.

“If we can’t get into the Break, at least let me take a run along the reef with the sledge,” Jimmy went on, and I knew then what we were carrying under the canvas wrapping on the foredeck.

“Just a couple of passes” along the front edge of the reef, past the entrance to the break.” He was pleading now, and Materson looked questioningly at me. You don’t often have opportunities like this offered you on a silver tray. I knew I could run Dancer within spitting distance of the coral without risk, but I frowned worriedly.

“I’d be taking a hell of a chance - but if we could agree on a bit of old danger money” I had Materson over the arm of the chair and I caned him for an extra day’s hire - five hundred dollars, payable in advance.

While we did the business, Guthrie helped Jimmy unwrap the sledge and carry it back to the cockpit.

I tucked the sheath of bank notes away and went back to rig the tow lines. The sledge was a beautifully constructed toboggan of stainless steel and plastic. In place of snow runners, it had stubby fin controls, rudder and hydrofoils, operated by a short joystick below the Perspex pilot’s shield.

There was a ring bolt in the nose to take the tow line by which I would drag the sledge in Dancer’s wake. Jimmy would lie on his belly behind the transparent shield, breathing compressed air from the twin tanks that were built into the chassis of the sledge. On the dashboard were depth and pressure gauges, directional compass and time elapse clock. With the joystick Jimmy could control the depth of the sledge’s dive, and yaw left or right across Dancer’s stern.

“Lovely piece of work,” I remarked, and he flushed with pleasure.

“Thanks, skipper, built it myself.” He was pulling on the wet suit of thick black Neoprene rubber and while his head was in the clinging hood I stooped and examined the maker’s plate that was riveted to the sledge’s chassis, memorizing the legend.

Built by North’s Underwater World.

5, Pavilion Arcade. BRIGHTON. SUSSEX.

I straightened up as his face appeared in the opening of the hood.

“Five knots is a good tow speed, skipper. If you keep a hundred yards off the reef, I’ll be able to deflect outwards and follow the contour of the coral.”

“Fine, Jim.”

“If I put up a yellow marker, ignore it, it’s only a find, and we will go back to it later - but if I send up a red, it’s trouble, try and get me off the reef and haul me in.” I nodded. “You have three hours,” I warned him. “Then she will begin the ebb up through the break and we’ll have to haul off.”

“That should be long enough,” he agreed.

Guthrie and I lifted the sledge over the side, and it wallowed low in the water. Jimmy clambered down to it and settled himself behind the screen, testing the controls, adjusting his faceplate and cramming the mouthpiece of the breathing device into his mouth. He breathed noisily and then gave me the thumbs up.

I climbed quickly to the bridge and opened the throttles. Dancer picked up speed and Guthrie paid out the thick nylon rope over the stern as the sledge fell away behind us. One hundred and fifty yards of rope went over, before the sledge jerked up and began to tow.

Jimmy waved, and I pushed Dancer up to a steady five knots. I circled wide, then edged in towards the reef, taking the big swells on Dancer’s beam so she rolled appallingly.

Again Jimmy waved, and I saw him push the control column of the sledge forwards. There was a turmoil of white water along her control fins and then suddenly she put her nose down and ducked below the surface. The angle of the nylon rope altered rapidly as the sledge went down, and then swung away towards the reef.

The strain on the rope made it quiver like an arrow as it strikes, and the water squirted from the fibres.

Slowly we ran parallel to the reef, closing the break. I watched the coral respectfully, taking no chances, and I imagined Jimmy far below the surface flying silently along the bottom, cutting in to skim the tall wall of underwater coral. It must have been an exhilarating sensation, and I envied him, deciding to hitch a ride on the sledge when I got the opportunity.

We came opposite the Break, passed it and just then I heard Guthrie shout. I glanced quickly over the stern and saw the big yellow balloon bobbing in our wake.

“He found something,” Guthrie shouted.

Jimmy had dropped a light leaded line, and a sparkler bulb had automatically inflated the yellow balloon with carbon dioxide gas to mark the spot.

I kept going steadily along the reef, and a quarter of a mile farther the angle of the tow line flattened and the sledge popped to the surface in a welter of water.

I swung away from the reef to a safe distance, and then went down to help Guthrie recover the sledge. Jimmy clambered into the cockpit, and when he pulled off his faceplate his lips were trembling and his grey eyes blazed. He took Materson’s arm and dragged him into the cabin, splashing sea water all over Chubby’s beloved deck..

Guthrie and I coiled the rope then lifted the sledge into the cockpit. I went back to the bridge, and took Dancer on a slow return to the entrance of Gunfire Break.

Materson and Jimmy came up on to the bridge before we reached it.

Materson was affected by Jimmy’s excitement. “The kid wants to try for a pick up.” I knew better than to ask what it was.

“What size?” I asked instead, and glanced at my wristwatch. We had an hour and a half before the rip tide began to run out through the break.

Not very big-” Jimmy assured me. “Fifty pounds maximum.”

“You sure, James? Not bigger?” I didn’t trust his enthusiasm not to minimize the effort involved.

“I swear it.”

“You want to put an airbag on it?”

“Yes, I’ll lift it with an airbag and then tow it away from the reef.”

I reversed Dancer in gingerly towards the yellow balloon that played lightly in the angry coral jaws of the Break. “That’s as close as I’ll go,” I shouted down into the cockpit, and Jimmy acknowledged with a wave.

He waddled duck-footed to the stern and adjusted his equipment. He had taken two airbags as well as the canvas cover from the sledge, and was roped up to the coil of nylon rope.

I saw him take a bearing on the yellow marker with the compass on his wrist, then once again he glanced up at me on the bridge before he flipped backwards over the stern and disappeared.

His regular breathing burst in a white rash below the stern, then began to move off towards the reef Guthrie paid out the bodyline after him.

I kept Dancer on station by using bursts of forward and reverse, holding her a hundred yards from the southern tip of the Break.

Slowly Jimmy’s bubbles approached the yellow marker, and then broke steadily beside it. He was working below it, and I imagined him fixing the empty airbags to the object with the nylon slings. It would be hard work with the suck and drag of the current worrying the bulky bags. Once he had fitted the slings he could begin to fill the bags with compressed air from his scuba bottles.

If Jimmy’s estimate of size was correct it would need very little inflation to pull the mysterious object off the bottom, and once it dangled free we could tow it into a safer area before bringing it aboard.

For forty minutes I held Dancer steady, then quite suddenly two swollen green shiny mounds broke the surface astern. The airbags were up - Jimmy had lifted his prize.

Immediately his hooded head surfaced beside the filled bags, and he held his right arm straight up. The signal to begin the tow.

“Ready?” I shouted at Guthrie in the cockpit.

“Ready!” He had secured the line, and I crept away from the reef, slowly and carefully to avoid up-ending the bags and spilling out the air that gave them lift.

Five hundred yards off the reef, I kicked Dancer into neutral and went to help haul in the swimmer and his fat green airbags.

“Stay where you are,” Materson snarled at me as I approached the ladder and I shrugged and went back to the wheel.

“The hell with them all, I thought, and lit a cheroot but I couldn’t prevent the tickle of excitement as they worked the bags alongside, and then walked them forward to the bows.

They helped Jimmy aboard, and he shrugged off the heavy compressed air bottles, dropping them to the deck while he pushed his faceplate on to his forehead.

His voice, ragged and high-pitched, carried clearly to me as I leaned on the bridge rail.

“Jackpod” he cried. “It’s the-‘ “Watch id” Materson. cautioned him, and James cut himself off and they all looked at me, lifting their faces to the bridge.

“Don’t mind me, boys,” I grinned and waved the cheroot cheerily.

They turned away and huddled. Jimmy whispered, and Guthrie said, “Jesus Christ!” loudly and slapped Materson’s back, and then they were all exclaiming and laughing as they crowded to the rail and began to lift the airbags and their burden aboard. They were clumsy with it, Dancer was rolling heavily, and I leaned forward with curiosity eating a hole in my belly.

My disappointment and chagrin were intense when I realized that Jimmy had taken the precaution of wrapping his prize in the canvas sledge cover. It came aboard as a sodden, untidy bundle of canvas, swathed in coils of nylon rope.

It was heavy, I could see by the manner in which they handled it - but it was not bulky, the size of a small suitcase. They laid it on the deck and stood around it happily. Materson smiled up at me.

“Okay, Fletcher. Come take a look.”

It was beautifully done, he played like a concert pianist on my curiosity. Suddenly I wanted very badly to know what they had pulled from the sea. I clamped the cheroot in my teeth as I swarmed down the ladder, and hurried towards the group in the bows. I was halfway across the foredeck, right out in the open, and Materson. was still smiling as he said softly. “Now!”

Only then did I know it was a set-up, and my mind began to move so fast that it all seemed to go by in extreme slow motion.

I saw the evil black bulk of the .45 in Guthrie’s fist, and it coming up slowly to aim into my belly. Mike Guthrie was in the marksman’s crouch, right arm fully extended, and he was grinning as he screwed up those speckled eyes and sighted along the thick-jacketed barrel.

I saw Jimmy North’s handsome young face contort with horror, saw him reach out to grip the pistol arm but Materson, still grinning, shoved him roughly aside and he staggered away with Dancer’s next roll.

I was thinking quite clearly and rapidly, it was not a procession of thought but a set of simultaneous images. I thought how neatly they had dropped the boom on me, a really professional hit.

I thought how presumptuous I had been in trying to make a deal with the wolf pack. For them it was easier to hit than to negotiate.

I thought that they would take out Jimmy now that he had watched this. That must have been their intention from the start. I was sorry for that. I had come to like the kid.

I thought about the heavy soft explosive lead slug that the .45 threw, about how’it would tear up the target, hitting with the shock of two thousand foot pounds.

Guthrie’s forefinger curled on the trigger and I began to throw myself at the rail beside me with the cheroot still in my mouth, but I knew it was too late.

The pistol in Guthrie’s hand kicked up head high, and I saw the muzzle flash palely in the sunlight. The cannon roar of the blast and the heavy lead bullet hit me together. The din deafened me and snapped my head back and the cheroot flipped up high in the air leaving a’trail of sparks. Then the impact of the bullet doubled me over, driving the air from my lungs, and lifted me off my feet, hurling me backwards until the deck rail caught me in the small of the back.

There was no pain, just that huge numbing shock. It was in the chest, I was sure of that, and I knew that it must have blown me open. It was a mortal wound, I was sure of that also and I expected my mind to go now. I expected to fade, going out into blackness.

Instead the rail caught me in the back and I somersaulted, going over the side head-first and the quick cold embrace of the sea covered me. It steadied me, and I opened MY eyes to the silver clouds of bubbles and the soft green of sunlight through the surface.

My lungs were empty, the air driven out by the impact of the bullet, and my instinct told me to claw to the surface for air, but surprisingly my mind was still clear and I knew that Mike Guthrie would blow the top off my skull the moment I surfaced. I rolled and dived, kicking clumsily, and went down under Dancer’s hull.

On empty lungs it was a long journey, Dancer’s smooth white belly passed slowly above me, and I drove on desperately, amazed that there was strength in my legs still.

Suddenly darkness engulfed me, a soft dark red cloud, and I nearly panicked, thinking my vision had gone — until suddenly I realized it was my own blood. Huge billowing clouds of my own blood staining the water. Tiny zebrastriped fish darted wildly through the cloud, gulping greedily at it.

I struck out, but my left arm would not respond. It trailed limply at my side, and blood blew like smoke about me.

There was strength in my right arm and I forged on under Dancer, passed under her keel and rose thankfully towards her far waterline.

As I came up I saw the nylon tow rope trailing over her stern, a hight of it hanging down below the surface and I snatched at it thankfully.

I broke the surface under Dancer’s stern, and I sucked painfully for air, my lungs felt bruised and numb, the air tasted like old copper in my mouth but I gulped it down.

My mind was still clear. I was under the stern, the wolf pack was in the bows, the carbine was under the engine hatch in the main cabin.

I reached up as high as I could and took a twist of the nylon rope around my right wrist, lifted my knees and got my toes on to the rubbing strake along Dancer’s waterline.

I knew I had enough strength for one attempt, no more. It would have to be good. I heard their voices from up in the bows, raised angrily, shouting at each other, but I ignored them and gathered all my reserve.

I heaved upwards, with both legs and the one good arm. My vision starred with the effort, and my chest was a numbed mass, but I came clear of the water and fell half across the stern rail, hanging there like an empty sack on a barbed-wire fence.

For seconds I lay there, while my vision cleared and I felt the slick warm outpouring of blood along my flank and belly. The flow of blood galvanized me. I realized how little time I had before the loss of it sent me plunging into blackness. I kicked wildly and tumbled headlong on to the cockpit floor, striking my head on the edge of the fighting chair, and grunting with the new pain of it.

I lay on my side and glanced down at my body. What I saw terrified me, I was streaming great gouts of thick blood, it was forming a puddle under me.

I clawed at the deck, dragging myself towards the cabin, and reached the combing beside the entrance. With another wild effort I pulled myself upright, hanging on one arm, supported by legs already weak and rubbery.

I glanced quickly around the angle of the cabin, down along the foredeck to where the three men were still grouped in the bows.

Jimmy North was struggling to strap his compressed air bottles on to his back again, his face was a mask of horror and outrage and his voice was strident as he screamed at Materson.

“You filthy bloody murderers. I’m-going down to find him. I’m going to get his body - and, so help me Christ, I’ll see you both hanged,” Even in my own distress I felt a sudden flare of admiration for the kid’s courage. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that he was also on the list. “It was murder, cold-blooded murder,” he shouted, and turned to the rail, settling the faceplate over his eyes and nose.

Materson looked across at Guthrie, the kid’s back was turned to them, and Materson nodded.

I tried to shout a warning, but it croaked hollowly in my throat, and Guthrie stepped up behind Jimmy. This time he made no mistake. He touched the muzzle of the big .45 to the base of Jimmy’s skull, and the shot was muffled by the neoprene rubber hood of the diving-suit.

Jimmy’s skull collapsed, shattered by the passage of the heavy bullet. It came out through the glass plate of the diving mask in a cloud of glass fragments. The force of it clubbed him over the side, and his body splashed alongside. Then there was silence in which the memory of gunfire seemed to echo with the sound of wind and water.

“He’ll sink,” said Materson. calmly. “He had on a weight belt - but we had better try and find Fletcher. We don’t want him washed up with that bullet hole in his chest.”

“He ducked - the bastard ducked - I didn’t hit him squarely-“

Guthrie protested, and I heard no more. My legs collapsed and I sprawled on the deck of the cockpit. I was sick with shock and horror and the quick flooding flow of my blood.

I have seen violent death in many guises, but Jimmy’s had moved me as never before. Suddenly there was only one thing I wanted to do before my own violent death overwhelmed me.

I began to crawl towards the engine-room hatch. The white deck seemed to stretch before me like the Sahara desert, and I was beginning to feel the leaden hand of a great weariness upon my shoulder.

I heard their footsteps on the deck above me, and the murmur of their voices. They were coming back to the cockpit.

“Ten seconds, please God,” I whispered. “That’s all I need,” but I knew it was futile. They would be into the cabin long before I reached the hatch - but I dragged myself desperately towards it.

“Then suddenly their footsteps paused, but the voices continued.

They had stopped to talk out on the deck, and I felt a lift of relief for I had reached the engine hatch.

Now I struggled with the toggles. They seemed to have jammed immovably, and I realized how weak I was, but I felt the revitalizing stir of anger through the weariness.

I wriggled around and kicked at the toggles and they flew back. I fought my weakness aside and got on to my knees. As I leaned over the hatch a fresh splattering of bright blood fell on the white deck.

“Eat your liver, Chubby,” I thought irrelevantly, and prised up the hatch. It came up achingly slowly, heavy as all the earth, and now I felt the first lances of pain in my chest as bruised tissue tore.

The hatch fell back with a heavy thump, and instantly the voices on deck were silent, and I could imagine them listening.

I fell on my belly and groped desperately under the decking and my right hand closed on the stock of the carbine.

“Come on!” There was a loud exclamation, and I recognized Materson’s voice, and immediately the pounding of running footsteps along the deck towards the cockpit.

I tugged wearily at the carbine, but it seemed to be caught in the slings and resisted my efforts..

“Christ! There’s blood all over the deck,” Materson shouted.

“It’s Fletcher,” Guthrie yelled. “He came in over the stern.”

just then the carbine came free and I almost dropped it down into the engine-room, but managed to hold it long enough to roll clear.

I sat up with the carbine in my lap, and pushed the safety catch across with my thumb, sweat and salt water streamed into my eyes blurring my vision as I peered up at the entrance to the cabin.

Materson ran into the cabin three paces before he saw me, then he stopped and gaped at me. His face was red with effort and agitation and he lifted his hands, spreading them in a protective gesture before him as I brought up the carbine. The diamond on his little finger winked merrily at me.

I lifted the carbine onehanded from my lap, and its immense weight appalled me. When the muzzle was pointed at Materson’s knees I pressed the trigger.

With a continuous shattering roar the carbine spewed out a solid blast of bullets, and the recoil flung the barrel upwards, riding the stream of fire from Materson’s crotch up across his belly and chest. It flung him backwards against the cabin bulkhead, and split him like the knife-stroke that guts a fish while he danced a grotesque and jerky little death jig.

I knew that I should not empty the carbine, there was still Mike Guthrie to deal with, but somehow I seemed unable to release my grip on the trigger and the bullets tore through Materson’s body, smashing and splintering the woodwork of the bulkhead.

Then suddenly I lifted my finger. The torrent of bullets ceased and Materson fell heavily forward.

The cabin stank with burned cordite and the sweet heavy smell of blood.

Guthrie ducked into the companionway of the cabin, crouching with right arm outflung and he snapped off a single shot at me as I sat in the centre of the cabin.

He had all the time he needed for a clean shot at me, but he hurried it, panicky and off-balance. The blast slapped against my ear drums, and the heavy bullet disrupted the air against my cheek as it flew wide. The recoil kicked the pistol high, and as it dropped for his next shot I fell sideways and pulled up the carbine.

There must have been a single round left in the breech, but it was a lucky one. I did not aim it, but merely jerked at the trigger as the barrel came up.

It hit Guthrie in the crook of his right elbow, shattering the joint and the Pistol flew backwards over his shoulder, skidded across the deck and thudded into the stern scuppers.

Guthrie spun aside, the arm twisting grotesquely and hanging from the broken joint and at the same instant the firing pin of the carbine fell on an empty chamber.

We stared at each other, both of us badly hit, but the old antagonism was still there between us. It gave me strength to come up on my knees and start towards him, the empty carbine falling from my hand.

Guthrie grunted and turned away, gripping the shattered arm with his good hand. He staggered towaids the .45 lying in the scuppers.

I saw there was no way I could stop him. He was not mortally hit, and I knew he could shoot probably as well with his good left hand. Still I made my last try and dragged myself over Materson’s body and out into the cockpit, reaching it just as Guthrie stooped to pick the pistol out of the scuppers.

Then Dancer came to my aid, and she reared like a wild horse as a freak swell hit her. She threw Guthrie off balance, and the pistol went skidding away across the deck. He turned to chase it, his feet slipped in the blood which I had splashed across the cockpit and he went down.

He fell heavily, pinning his shattered arm under him. He cried out, and rolled on to his knees and began crawling swiftly after the glistening black pistol.

Against the outer bulkhead of the cockpit the long flying gaffs stood in their rack like a set of billiard cues. Ten feet long, with the great stainless-steel hooks uppermost.

Chubby had filed the points as cruelly as stilettos. They were designed to be buried deep into a game fish’s body, and the shock of the blow would detach the head from the stock. The fish could then be dragged on board with the length of heavy nylon rope that was spliced on to the hook.

Guthrie had almost reached the pistol as I knocked open the clamp on the rack and lifted down one of the gaffs. Guthrie scooped up the pistol left-handed, juggling it to get a grip on it, concentrating his whole attention on the weapon and while he was busy I came up on my knees again and lifted the gaff with one hand, throwing it up high and reaching out over Guthrie’s bowed back. As the hook flashed down over him I hit the steel in hard, driving it full length through his ribs, burying the gleaming steel to the curve. The shock of it pulled him down on to the deck and once again the pistol dropped from his hand and the roll of the boat pushed it away from him.

Now he was screaming, a high-pitched wail of agony with the steel deep in him. I tugged harder, single-handed, trying to work it into heart or lung and the hook broke from the stock. Guthrie rolled across the deck towards the pistol. He groped frantically for it, and I dropped the gaff stock and groped just as frantically for the rope to restrain him.

I have seen two women wrestlers fighting in a bath of black mud, in a nightclub in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg - and now Guthrie and I performed the same act, only in place of mud we fought in a bath of our own blood. We slithered and rolled about the deck, thrown about mercilessly by Dancer’s action in the swell.

Guthrie was weakening at last, clawing with his good hand at the great hook buried in his body, and with the next roll of the sea I was able to throw a coil of the rope around his neck and get a firm purchase against the base of the fighting chair with one foot. Then I pulled with all the remains of my strength and resolve.

Suddenly, with a single explosive expulsion of breath, his tongue fell out of his mouth and he relaxed, his limbs stretched out limply and his head lolled loosely back and forth with Dancer’s roll.

I was tired beyond caring now. My hand opened of its own accord and the rope fell from it. I lay back and closed my eyes. Darkness fell over me like a shroud.

When I regained consciousness my face felt as though it had been scalded with acid, my lips were swollen and my thirst raged like a forest fire. I had lain face up under a tropical sun for six hours, and it had burned me mercilessly.

Slowly I rolled on to my side, and cried out weakly at the immensity of pain that was my chest. I lay still for a while to let it subside and then I began to explore the wound.

The bullet had angled in through the bicep of my left arm, missing bone, and come out through the tricep, tearing, a big exit hole. Immediately it had ploughed into the side of my chest.

Sobbing with the effort I traced and probed the wound with my finger. It had glanced over a rib, I could feel the exposed bone was cracked and rough-ended where the slug had struck and been deflected and left slivers of lead and bone chips in the churned flesh. It had gone through the thick muscle of my back - and torn out below the shoulder blade, leaving a hole the size of a detni tasse coffee cup.

I fell back on to the deck, panting and fighting back waves of giddy nausea. My exploration had induced fresh bleeding, but I knew at least that the bullet had not entered the chest cavity. I still had some sort of a chance.

While I rested I looked blearily about me. My hair and clothing were stiff with dried blood, blood was coated over the cockpit, dried black and shiny or congealed.

Guthrie lay on his back with the gaff hook still in him and the rope around his neck. The gases in his belly had already blown, giving him a pregnant swollen look. I got up on to my knees and began to crawl. Materson’s body half-blocked the entrance to the cabin, shredded by gunfire as though he had been mauled by a savage predator.

I crawled over him, and found I was whimpering aloud as I saw the icebox behind the bar.

I drank three cans of Coca-Cola, gasping and choking in my eagerness, spilling the icy liquid down my chest, and moaning and snuffling through each mouthful. Then I lay and rested again. I closed my eyes and just wanted to sleep for ever.

“Where the hell are we?” The question hit me with a shock of awareness. Dancer was adrift on a treacherous coast, strewn with reefs and shoals.

I dragged myself to my feet and reached the blood-caked cockpit.

Beneath us flowed the deep purple blue of the Mozambique, and a clear horizon circled us, above which the massive cloud ranges climbed to a tall blue sky. The ebb and the wind had pushed us far out to the east, we had plenty of sea room.

MY legs collapsed under me, and I may have slept for a while.

When I woke MY head felt clearer, but the wound had stiffened horribly.

Each movement was agony. On my hand and knees I reached the shower room where the medicine chest was kept. I ripped away my shirt and poured undiluted acriflavine solution into the cavernous wounds. Then I plugged them roughly with surgical dressing and strapped the whole as best I could, but the effort was too much.

The dizziness overwhelmed me again and I crashed down on to the linoleum floor unconscious.

I awoke light-headed, and feeble as a new-born infant.

It was a major effort to fashion a sling for the wounded arm, and the journey to the bridge was an endless procession of dizziness and pain and nausea.

Dancer’s engines started with the first kick, sweet as ever she was.

Take me home, me darling,” I whispered, and set the automatic pilot. I gave her an approximate heading. Dancer settled on course, and the darkness caught me again. I went down sprawling on the deck, welcoming oblivion as it washed over me.

it may have been the altered action of Dancer’s passage that roused me. She no longer swooped and rolled with the big swell of the Mozambique, but ambled quietly along over a sheltered sea. Dusk was falling swiftly.

Stiffly I dragged myself up to the wheel. I was only just in time, for dead ahead lay the loom of land in the fading light. I slammed Dancer’s throttle closed, and kicked her into neutral. She came up and rocked gently in a low sea. I recognized the shape of the land - it was Big Gull Island.

We had missed the channel of Grand Harbour, my heading had been a little southerly and we had rim into the southernmost straggle of tiny atolls that made up the St. Mary’s group.

Hanging on to the wheel for support I craned forward. The canvas-wrapped bundle still lay on the foredeck - and suddenly I knew that I must get rid of it. My reasons were not clear then. Dimly I realized that it was a high card in the game into which I had been drawn. I knew I dare not ferry it back into Grand Harbour in broad daylight. Three men had been killed for it already - and Id had half my chest shot away. There was some strong medicine wrapped up in that sheet of canvas.

It took me fifteen minutes to reach the foredeck, and I blacked out twice on the way. When I crawled to the bundle of canvas I was sobbing aloud with each movement.

For another half-hour I tried feebly to unwrap the stiff canvas and untie the thick nylon knots. With only one hand and my fingers so numb and weak that they could not close properly it was a hopeless task, and the blackness kept filling my head. I was afraid I would go out with the bundle still aboard.

Lying on my side I used the last rays of the setting sun to take a bearing off the point of the island, lining up a clump of palms and the point of the high ground - marking the spot with care.

Then I opened the swinging section of the foredeck railing through which we usually pulled big fish aboard, and I wriggled around the canvas bundle - got both feet on to it and shoved it over the side. It fell with a heavy splash and droplets splattered in my face.

My exertions had re-opened the wounds and fresh blood was soaking my clumsy dressing. I started back across the deck but I did not make it. I went out for the last time as I reached the break of the cockpit.

The morning sun and a raucous barnyard squawking woke me, but when I opened my eyes the sun seemed shaded, darkened as though in eclipse. My vision was fading, and when I tried to move there was no strength for it. I lay crushed beneath the weight of weakness and pain. Dancer was canted at an absurd angle, probably stranded high and dry on the beach.

I stared up into the rigging above me. There were three black-backed gulls as big as turkeys sitting in a row on the cross stay. They twisted their heads sideways to look down at me, and their beaks were clear yellow and powerful. The upper part of the beak ended in a curved point that was a bright cherry red. They watched me with glistening black eyes, and fluffed out their feathers impatiently.

I tried to shout at them, to drive them away but my lips would not move. I was completely helpless, and I knew that soon they would begin on my eyes. They always went for the eyes.

One of the gulls above me grew bold and spreading his wings, planed down to the deck near me. He folded his wings and waddled a few steps closer, and we stared at each other. Again I tried to scream, but no sound came and the gull waddled forward again, then stretched out his neck, opened that wicked beak and let out a hoarse screech of menace. I felt the whole of my dreadfully abused body cringing away from the bird.

Suddenly the tone of the screeching gulls altered, and the air was filled with their wing beats. The bird that I was watching screeched again, but this time in disappointment and it launched itself into flight, the draught from its wings striking my face as it rose.

There was a long silence then, as I lay on the heavily listing deck, fighting off the waves of darkness that tried to overwhelm me. Then suddenly there was a scrabbling sound alongside.

I rolled my head again to face it, and at that moment a dark chocolate face rose above deck level and stared at me from a range of two feet.

“Lardy!” said a familiar voice. “Is that you, Mister Harry?”

I learned later that Henry Wallace, one of St. Mary’s turtle hunters, had been camped out on the atolls and had risen from his bed of straw to find Wave Dancer stranded by the ebb on the sand bar of the lagoon with a cloud of gulls squabbling over her. He had waded out across the bar, and climbed the side to peer into the slaughterhouse that was Dancer’s cockpit.

I wanted to tell him how thankful I was to see him, I wanted to promise him free beer for the rest of his life - but instead I started to weep, just a slow welling up of tears from deep down. I didn’t even have the strength to sob.

“A little scratch like that,” marvelled Macnab. “What’s all the fussing about?” and he probed determinedly.

I gasped as he did something else to my back; if I had had the strength I would have got up off the hospital bed and pushed that probe up the most convenient opening of his body. Instead I moaned weakly.

“Come on,- Doc. Didn’t they teach you about morphine and that stuff back in the time when you should have failed your degree?”

Macnab came around to look in my face. He was plump and scarlet-faced, fiftyish and greying in hair and moustache. His breath should have anaesthetized me.

“Harry, my boy, that stuff costs money - what are you, anyway, National Health or a private patient?”

“I just changed my status - I’m private.”

“Quite right, too,” Macnab agreed. “Man of your standing in the community,” and he nodded to the sister. “Very well then, my dear, give Mister Harry a grain of morphine before we proceed,” and while he waited for her to prepare the shot he went on to cheer me up. “We put six pints of whole blood into you last night, you were just about dry. Soaked it up like a sponge.”

Well, you wouldn’t expect one of the giants of the medical profession to be practising on St. Mary’s. I could almost believe the island rumour that he was in partnership with Fred Coker’s mortician parlour.

“How long you going to keep me in here anyway, Doc?”

“Not more than a month.”

“A month!” I struggled to sit up and two nurses pounced on me to restrain me, which required no great effort. I could still hardly raise my head. “I can’t afford a month. My God, it’s right in the middle of the season. I’ve got a new party coming next week!”

The sister hurried across with the syringe.

“- You trying to break me? I can’t afford to miss a single party-” The sister hit me with the needle.

“Harry old boy, you can forget about this season. You won’t be fishing again,” and he began picking bits of bone and flakes of lead out of me while he hummed cheerily to himself. The morphine dulled the pain - but not my despair.

If Dancer and I missed half a season we just couldn’t keep going.

Once again they had me stretched out on the financial rack. God, how I hated money.

Macnab strapped me up in clean white bandages, and spread a little more sunshine.

“You going to lose some furiction in your left arm there, Harry boy. Probably always be a little stiff and weak, and you going to have some pretty scars to show the girls.” He finished winding the bandage and turned to the sister. “Change the dressings every six hours, swab out with Eusol and give him his usual dose of Aureo Mycytin every four hours. “hree Mogadon tonight and I’ll see him on my rounds tomorrow.” He turned back to grin at me with bad teeth under the untidy grey moustache. “The entire police force is waiting outside this very room. I’ll have to let them in now.” He started towards the door, then paused to chuckle again. “You did a hell of a job on those two guys, spread them over the scenery with a spade. Nice shooting, Harry boy.”

Inspector Daly was dressed in impeccable khaki drill, starched and pristine, and his leather belts and straps glowed with a high polish.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Fletcher. I have come to take a statement from you. I hope you feel strong enough.”

“I feel wonderful, Inspector. Nothing like a bullet through the chest to set you up.”

Daly turned to the constable who followed him and motioned him to take the chair beside the bed, and as he sat and prepared his shorthand pad the constable told me softly, “Sorry you got hurt, Mister Harry.”

“Thanks, Wally, but you should have seen the other guys. Wally was one of Chubby’s nephews, and his mother did my laundry. He was a big, strong, darkly good-looking Youngster.

“I saw them” he grinned. “Wow!”

“If you are ready, Mr. Fletcher,” Daly cut in primly, annoyed by the exchange. “We can get on.” “Shoot,” I said, and I had my story well prepared. Like all good stories, it was the exact and literal truth, with omissions. I made no mention of the prize that James North had lifted, and which I had dumped again off Big Gull Island - nor did I tell Daly in which area we had conducted our search. He wanted to know, of course. He kept coming back to that.

“What were they searching for? “I have no idea. They were very careful not to let me know. “Where did all this happenr he persisted.

“in the area beyond Herring Bone Reef, south of Rastafa Point.” This was fifty miles from the break at Gunfire Reef. “Could you recognize the exact point where they dived?” I don’t think so, not within a few miles. I was merely following instructions.”

Daly chewed his silky moustache in frustration.

“All right, you say they attacked you without warning,” and I nodded. Why did they do that? - why would they try to kill you? “We never really discussed it. I didn’t have a chance to ask them.” I was beginning to feel very tired and feeble again, I didn’t want to go on talking in case I made a mistake. “When Guthrie started shooting at me with that cannon of his I didn’t think he wanted to chat.” “This isn’t a joke, Fletcher,” he told me stiffly, and I rang the bell beside me. The sister must have been waiting just outside the door.

“Sister, I’m feeling pretty bad.”

“You’ll have to go now, Inspector.” She turned on the two policemen like a mother hen, and drove them from the ward. Then she came back to rearrange my pillows.

She was a pretty little thing with huge dark eyes, and her tiny waist was belted in firmly to accentuate her big nicely shaped bosom on which she wore her badges and medals. Lustrous chestnut curls peeped from under the saucy little uniform cap.

“What is your name, then? I whispered hoarsely. “May.”

“Sister May, how come I haven’t seen you around before?” I asked, as she leaned across me to tuck in my sheet.

“Guess you just weren’t looking, Mister Harry.”

“Well, I’m looking now.” The front of her crisp white uniform blouse was only a few inches from my nose. She stood up quickly.

They say here you’re a devil man,” she said. “I know now they didn’t tell me lies.” But she was smiling. Now you go to sleep. You’ve got to get strong again.”

“Yeah, we’ll talk again then,” I said, and she laughed out loud.

The next three days I had a lot of time to think for I was allowed no visitors until the official inquest had been conducted. Daly had a constable on guard outside my room, and I was left in no doubt that I stood accused of murder most vile.

My room was cool and airy with a good view down across the lawns to the tall dark-leafed banyan trees, and beyond them the massive stone walls of the fort with the cannon upon the battlements. The food was good, plenty of fish and fruit, and Sister May and I were becoming good, if not intimate, friends. She even smuggled in a bottle of Chivas Regal which we kept in the bedpan. From her I heard how the whole island was agog with the cargo that Wave Dancer had brought into Grand Harbour. She told me they buried Materson and Guthrie on the second day in the old cemetery. A corpse doesn’t keep so well in those latitudes.

In those three days I decided that the bundle I had dropped off Big Gull Island would stay there. I guessed that from now on there would be a lot of eyes watching me, and I was at a complete disadvantage. I didn’t know who the watchers were and I didn’t know why. I would keep down off the skyline until I worked out where the next bullet was likely to come from. I didn’t like the game. They could deal me out and I would stick to the action I could call and handle.

I thought a lot about Jimmy North also, and every time I felt myself grieving unnecessarily I tried to tell myself that he was a stranger, that he had meant nothing to me, but it didn’t work. This is a weakness of mine which I must always guard against. I become too readily emotionally bound up with other people. I try to walk alone, avoiding involvement, and after years of practice I have achieved some success. It is seldom these days that anyone can penetrate my armour the way Jimmy North did.

By the third day I was feeling much stronger. I could lift myself into a sitting position without assistance and with only a moderate degree of pain.

They held the official inquest in my hospital room. It was a closed session, attended only by the heads of the legislative, judicial and executive branches of St. Mary’s government.

The President himself, dressed as always in black with a crisp white shirt and a halo of snowy wool around his bald pate, chaired the meeting. judge Harkness, tall and thin and sunburned to dark brown, assisted him - while Inspector Daly represented the executive.

The President’s first concern was for my comfort and wellbeing.

I was one of his boys.

“You be sure you don’t tire yourself now, Mister Harry. Anything you want you just ask, hear? We have only come here to hear your version, but I want to tell you now not to worry. There is nothing going to happen to you.”

Inspector Daly looked pained, seeing his prisoner declared innocent before his trial began.

So I told my story again, with the President making helpful or admiring comments whenever I paused for breath, and when I finished he shook his head with wonder.

“All I can say, Mister Harry, is there are not many men would have had the strength and courage to do what you did against those gangsters, is that right, gentlemen?”

judge Harkness agreed heartily, but Inspector Daly said nothing.

“And they were gangsters too,” he went on. “We sent their fingerprints to London and we heard today that those men came here under false names, and that both of them have got police records at Scotland Yard. Gangsters, both of them.” The President looked at judge Harkness. “Any questions, Judge?”

“I don’t think so, Mr. President.”

“Good.” The President nodded happily. “What about you, Inspector?” And Daly produced a typewritten list. The President made no effort to hide his irritation.

“Mister Fletcher is still a very sick man, Inspector. I hope your questions are really important.”

Inspector Daly hesitated and the President went on brusquely, “Good, well then we are all agreed. The verdict is death by misadventure. Mister Fletcher acted in selfdefence, and is hereby discharged from any guilt. No criminal charges will be brought against him.” He turned to the shorthand recorder in the corner. “Have you got that? Type it out and send a copy to my office for signature.” He stood up and came to my bedside. “Now you get better soon, Mister Harry. I expect you for dinner at Government House soon as you are well enough. My secretary will send you a formal invitation. I want to hear the whole story again.”

Next time I appear before a judicial body, as I surely shall, I hope for the same consideration. Having been officially declared innocent I was allowed visitors.

Chubby and Mrs. Chubby came together dressed in their standard number one rig. Mrs. Chubby had baked one of her splendid banana cakes, knowing my weakness for them.

Chubby was torn by relief at seeing me still alive and outrage at what I had done to Wave Dancer. He scowled at me fiercely as he started giving me a large slice of his mind.

“Ain’t never going to get that deck clean again. It soaked right in, man. That damned old carbine of yours really chewed up the cabin bulkhead. Me and Angelo been working three days at it now, and it still needs a few more days.”

“Sorry, Chubby, next time I shoot somebody I’m going to make them stand by the rail first.” I knew that when Chubby had finished repairing the woodwork the damage would not be detectable.

“When you coming out anyway? Plenty of big fish working out there on the stream, Harry.”

“I be out pretty soon, Chubby. One week tops.”

Chubby sniffed. “Did hear that Fred Coker wired all your parties for rest of the season - told them you were hurt bad and switched their bookings to Mister Coleman.”

I lost my temper then. “You tell Fred Coker to get his black arse up here soonest,” I shouted.

Dick Coleman had a deal with the Hilton Hotel. They had financed the purchase of two big game fishing boats, which Coleman crewed with a pair of imported skippers. Neither of his boats caught much fish, they didn’t have the feel of it. He had a lot of difficulty getting charters, and I guessed Fred Coker had been handsomely compensated to switch my bookings to him. Coker arrived the following morning.

“Mister Harry, Doctor Macnab told me you wouldn’t be able to fish again this season. I couldn’t let my parties down, they fly six thousand miles to find you in a hospital bed. I couldn’t do that - I got my reputation to think of.”

“Mr. Coker, your reputation smells like one of those stiffs you got tucked away in the back room,” I told him, and he smiled at me blandly from behind his goldrimmed spectacles, but he was right of course, it would be a long time still before I could take Dancer out after the big billfish.

“Now don’t you fuss yourself, Mister Harry. Soon as you better I will arrange a few lucrative charters for you.”

He was talking about the night run again, his commission on a single run could go as high as seven hundred and fifty dollars. I could handle that even in my present beatenup condition, it involved merely conning Dancer in and out again - just as long as we didn’t run into trouble.

“Forget it, Mr. Coker. I told you from now on I fish, that’s all” and he nodded and smiled and went on as though I had not spoken.

“Had persistent inquiries from one of your old clients! “Body?

Box?” I demanded. Body was the illegal carrying to or from the African mainland of human beings, fleeing politicians with the goon squad after them - or on the other hand aspiring politicians trying for radical change in the regime. Boxes usually contained lethal hardware and it was a one-way traffic. In the old days they called it gunk running.

Coker shook his head and said, “Five, six,” - from the old nursery rhyme: “Five, six. Pick up sticks.” In this context sticks were tusks of ivory. A massive, highly organized poaching operation was systematically wiping out the African elephant from the game reserves and tribal lands of East Africa. The Orient was an insatiable and high-priced market for the ivory. A fast boat and a good skipper were needed to get the valuable cargo out of an estuary mouth, through the dangerous inshore waters, out to where one of the big ocean-going dhows waited on the stream of the Mozambique.

“Mr. Coker,” I told him wearily. “I’m sure your mother never even knew your father’s name.” “It was Edward, Mister Harry,“he smiled carefully. “I told the client that the going rate was up. What with inflation and the price of diesel fuel.”

“How much?”

“Seven thousand dollars a trip,” which was not as much as it sounds after Coker had clouted fifteen per cent, then Inspector Peter Daly had to be slipped the same again to dim his eyesight and cloud his hearing. On top of that Chubby and Angelo always earned a danger money bonus of five hundred each for a night run.

“Forget it, Mr. Coker,” I said unconvincingly. “You just fix a couple of fishing parties.” But he knew I couldn’t fight it.

“Just as soon as you fit enough to fish, we’ll fix that.

Meantime, when do you want to do the first night run? Shall I tell them ten days from today? That will be high spring tide and a good moon.”

“All right,” I agreed with resignation. “Ten days” time.” With a positive decision made, it seemed that my recovery from the wounds was hastened. I had been in peak physical condition which contributed, and the gaping holes in my arm and back began to shrink miraculously.

I reached a milestone in my convalescence on the sixth day.

Sister May was giving me a bed bath, with a basin of suds and a face cloth, when there was a monumental demonstration of my physical wellbeing. Even I, who was no stranger to the phenomenon, was impressed, while Sister May was so overcome that her voice became a husky little whisper.

“Lord!” she said. “You’ve sure got your strength back.”

“Sister May, do you think we should waste that?” I asked, and -she shook her head vehemently.

from then onwards I began to take a more cheerful view of my circumstances, and not surprisingly the Fcanvas-wrapped secret off Big Gull Island began to nag me. I felt my good resolutions weakening.

“I’ll just take a look,” I told myself. “When I am sure the dust has really settled.”

They were allowing me up for a few hours at a time now, and I felt restless and anxious to get on with it. Not even Sister May’s devoted efforts could blunt the edge of my awakening energy. Macnab was impressed.

“You heal well Harry old chap. Closing up nicely another week.” “A week, hell!” I told him determinedly. Seven days from now I was making the night run. Coker had set it up without trouble - and I was just about stony broke. I needed that run pretty badly.

My crew came up to visit me every evening, and to report progress on the repairs to Dancer. One evening Angelo arrived earlier than usual, he was dressed in his courting gear - rodeo boots and all - but he was strangely subdued and not alone.

The lass with him was the young nursery grade teacher from the goverriment school down near the fort. I knew her well enough to exchange smiles on the street. Missus Eddy had summed up her character for me once.

“She’s a good girl, that Judith. Not all flighty and flirty like some others. Going to make some lucky fellow a good wife.”

She was also good-looking with a tall willowy figure, neatly and conservatively dressed, and she greeted me shyly.

“How do, Mister Harry.”

“Hello, Judith. Good of you to come,” and I looked at Angelo, unable to hide my grin. He couldn’t meet my eye, colouring up as he hunted for words.

“Me and Judith planning to marry up,” he blurted at last. “Wanted you to know that, boss.”

“Think you can keep him under control, Judith?” I laughed delightedly.

“You just watch me,” she said with a flash of dark eyes that made the question superfluous.

“That’s great - I’ll make a speech at your wedding,” I assured them. “You going to let Angelo go on crewing for me?”

“Wouldn’t ever try to stop him,” she assured me. “It’s good work he’s got with you.”

They stayed for another hour and when they left I felt a small prickle of envy. It must be a good feeling to have someone - apart from yourself. I thought some day if I ever found the right person I might try it. Then I dismissed the thought, raising my guard again. There were a hell of a lot of women - and no guarantee you will pick right.

Macnab discharged me with two days to spare. My clothes hung on my bony frame, I had lost nearly two stone in weight and my tan had faded to a dirty yellow brown, there were big blue smears under my eyes and I still felt weak as a baby. The arm was in a sling and the wounds were still open, but I could change the dressing myself.

Angelo brought the pick-up to the hospital and waited while I said goodbye to Sister May on the steps.

Nice getting to know you, Mister Hairy.”

“Come out to the shack some time soon. I’ll grill you a mess of crayfish, and we’ll drink a little wine.”

“My contract ends next week. I’ll be going home to England then.”

“You be happy, hear,” I told her.

Angelo drove me down to Admiralty, and with Chubby we spent an hour going over Dancer’s repairs.

Her decks were snowy white, and they had replaced all the woodwork in the saloon bulkhead, a beautiful piece of joinery with which even I could find no fault.

We took her down the channel as far as Mutton Point and it was good to feel her riding lightly under my feet and hear the sweet burble of her engines. We came home in the dusk to tie up at moorings and sit out on the bridge in the dark, drinking beer out of the can and talking.

I told them that we had a run set for the following night, and they asked where to and what the cargo was. That was all - it was set, there was no argument.

“Time to go,” Angelo said at last. “Going to pick Judith up from night school,” and we rowed ashore in the dinghy. There was a police Land-Rover parked beside my old pick-up at the back of the pineapple sheds and Wally, the young constable, climbed out as we approached. He greeted his uncle, and then turned to me.

“Sorry to worry you, Mister Harry, but Inspector Daly wants to see you up at the fort. He says it’s urgent.”

“God,” I growled. “It can wait until tomorrow.” “He says it can’t, Mister Harry.” Wally was apologetic, and for his sake I went along.

“Okay, I’ll follow you in the pick-up - but we got to drop Chubby and Angelo off first.”

I thought it was probably that Daly wanted to haggle about his pay off. Usually Fred Coker fixed that, but I guessed that Daly was raising the price of his honour.

Driving onehanded and holding the steering wheel with a knee while I shifted gear with my good hand, I followed the red tail lights of Wally’s Land-Rover rattling over the drawbridge and parked beside it in the courtyard of the fort.

The massive stone walls had been built by slave labour in the mid-eighteenth century and from the wide ramparts the long thirty-six-pounder cannon ranged the channel and the entrance to Grand Harbour.

One wing was used as the island police headquarters, jail and armoury - the rest of it was government offices and the Presidential and State apartments.

We climbed the front steps to the charge office and Wally led me through a side door, and along a corridor, down steps, another corridor, more stone steps.

I had never been down here before and I was intrigued. The stone walls here must have been twenty feet thick, the old powder store probably. I half expected the Frankenstein monster to be lurking behind the thick oak door, iron studded and weathered, at the end of the last passage. We went through.

It wasn’t Frankenstein, but next best. Inspector Daly waited for us with another of his constables. I noticed immediately they both wore sidearms. The room was empty except for a wooden table and four PWD type chairs. The walls were unpainted stonework and the floor was paved.

At the back of the room an arched doorway led to a row of cells.

The lights were bare hundred-watt bulbs hanging on black electrical cable that ran exposed across the beamed roof. They cast hard black shadows in the angles of the irregularly shaped room.

On the table lay my FN carbine. I stared at it uncomprehendingly.

Behind me Wally closed the oak door. “Mr. Fletcher, is this your firearm?” “You know damn well it is,” I said angrily. “Just what the hell are you playing at, Daly?”

“Harold Delville Fletcher, I am placing you under arrest for the unlawful possession of Category A firearms. To wit, one unlicensed automatic rifle type Fabrique Nationale Serial No. 4163215.”

“You’re off your head,” I said, and laughed. He didn’t like that laugh. The weak little lips below his moustache puckered up like those of a sulky child and he nodded at his constables. They had been briefed, and they went out through the oak door.

I heard the bolts shoot home, and Daly and I were alone. He was standing well away from me across the room - and the flap of his holster was unbuttoned.

“Does his excellency know about this, Daly?” I asked, still smiling.

“His excellency left St. Mary’s at four o’clock this after, noon to attend the conference of Commonwealth heads in London. He won’t be back for two weeks.”

I stopped smiling. I knew it was true. “In the meantime I have reason to believe the security of the State is endangered.” He smiled now, thinly and with the mouth only. “Before we go any further I want you to be sure I am serious.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“I have two weeks with you alone, here, Fletcher. These walls are pretty thick, you can make as much noise as you like.”

“You are a monstrous little turd, you really are.”

“There is only one of two ways you are going to leave here.

Either you and I come to an arrangement - or I’ll get Fred Coker to come and fetch you in a box.”

“Let’s hear your deal, little man.”

“I want to know exactly - and I mean exactly - where your charter carried out their diving operations before the shoot out.” “I told you - somewhere off Rastafa Point. I couldn’t give you the exact spot.”

“Fletcher, you know the spot to within inches. I’m willing to stake your life on that. You wouldn’t miss a chance like that. You know it. I know it - and they knew it. That’s why they tried to sign you off.”

“Inspector, go screw,” I said.

“What is more it was nowhere near Rastafa Point. You were working north of here, towards the mainland. I was interested - I had some reports of your movements.”

“It was somewhere off Rastafa Point,” I repeated doggedly. “Very well,” he nodded. “I hope you aren’t as tough as you put out, Fletcher, otherwise this is going to be a long messy business. Before we start though, don’t waste our time with false data. I’m going to keep you here while I check it out - I’ve got two weeks.”

We stared at each other, and my flesh began to crawl. Peter Daly was going to enjoy this, I realized. There was a gloating expression on those thin lips and a smoky glaze to his eyes.

“I had a great deal of experience in interrogation in Malaya, you know. Fascinating subject. So many aspects to it. So often it’s the tough, strong ones that pop first - and the little runts that hang on for ever.

This was for kicks, I saw clearly that he was aroused by the prospect of inflicting pain. His breathing had changed, faster and deeper, there was fresh colour in his cheeks.

“–of course, you are at a physical low ebb right now, Fletcher.

Probably your threshold of pain is much lowered after your recent misadventures. I don’t think it will take long.”

He seemed to regret that. I gathered myself, tightening up for an attempt.

“No,” he snapped. “Don’t do it, Fletcher.” He placed his hand on the butt of the pistol. He was fifteen feet away. I was one-armed, weak, there was a locked door behind me, two armed constables - my shoulders sagged as I relaxed.

“That’s better.” He smiled again. “Now I think we will handcuff you to the bars of a cell, and we can get to work. When you have had enough you have merely to say so. I think you will find my little electrical set-up simple but effective. It’s merely a twelve-volt car battery - and I clip the terminals on to interesting parts of the body-” He reached behind him - and for the first time I noticed the button of an electric bell set on the wall. He pressed it and I heard the bell ring faintly beyond the oaken door.

The bolts shot back and the two constables came back in.

“Take him through to the cells,” Daly ordered, and the constables hesitated. I guessed they were strangers to this type of operation.

“Come on,” snapped Daly, and they stepped up on either side of me.

Wally laid a hand lightly on my injured arm, and I allowed myself to be led forward towards the cells and Daly.

I wanted to have a chance at him, just one chance. “How’s your mom, Wally? I asked casually.

“She’s all right, Mister Harry,” he muttered embarrassedly.

“She get the present I sent up for her birthday?”

“Yeah, she got it.” He was distracted as I intended.

We had come level, with Daly. he was standing by the doorway to the cells, waiting for us to go through, slapping the malacca, swagger stick against his thigh.

The constables were holding me respectfully, loosely, unsure of themselves, and I stepped to one side pushing Wally slightly off balance - then I spun back, breaking free.

Not one of them was ready for it, and I covered the three paces to Daly before they had realized what I was doing - and I put my right knee into him with my full body weight behind it. It thumped into the crotch of his legs, a marvellously solid blow. Whatever the price I was going to have to pay for the pleasure, it was cheap.

Daly was lifted off his feet, a full eighteen inches in the air, and he flew backwards to crash against the bars. Then he doubled up, both hands pressed into his lower body, screaming thinly - a sound like steam from a boiling kettle. As he went over I lined up for another shot at his face, I wanted to take his teeth out with a kick in the mouth - but the constables recovered their wits and leaped forward to drag me away. They were rough now, twisting the arm.

“You didn’t ought to do that, Mister Harry,” Wally shouted angrily. His fingers bit into my bicep and I gritted my teeth.

“The President himself cleared me, Wally. You know that,” I shouted back at him, and Daly straightened up, his face twisted with agony, still holding himself.

“This is a frame up.” I knew I had only a few seconds to talk, Daly was reeling towards me, brandishing the swagger stick, his mouth wide open as he tried to find his voice.

“If he gets me in that cell he’s going to kill me Wally!”

“Shut up!” screeched Daly.

“He wouldnt dare try this if the President–2 “Shut up! Shut up!” He swung the swagger stick, a side, arm cut, that hissed like a cobra. He had gone for my wounds deliberately, and the supple cane snapped around me like a pistol shot.

The pain of it was beyond belief, and I convulsed, bucking involuntarily in their grip. They held me.

“Shut up!” Daly was hysterical with pain and rage. He swung again, and the cane cut deeply into half-healed flesh. This time I screamed.

“I’ll kill you, you bastard.” Daly staggered back, still hunched with pain, and he fumbled with his holstered pistol.

What I had hoped for now happened. Wally released me and jumped forward.

No,” he shouted. “Not that.”

He towered over Daly’s slim crouching form and with one massive brown hand he blocked Daly’s draw.

“Get out of my way. That’s an order,” shouted Daly, but Wally unclipped. the lanyard from the pistol’s butt and disarmed him, stepping back with the pistol in his hand.

“I’ll break you for this,” snarled Daly. “It’s your duty-“

“I know my duty, Inspector,” Wally spoke with a simple dignity, “and it’s not to murder prisoners.” Then he turned to me. “Mister Harry, you’d best get out of here.”

“You’re freeing a prisoner-” Daly gasped. “Man, I’m going to break you.”

“Didn’t see no warrant,” Wally cut in. “Soon as the President signs a warrant, we’ll fetch Mister Harry right back in again.”

“You black bastard,” Daly panted at him, and Wally turned to me.

“Get!“he said. “Quickly.”

It was a long ride out to the shack, every bump in the track hit me in the chest. One thing I had learned from I the evening’s joliffications was that my original thoughts were correct - whatever that bundle off Big Gull Island contained, it could get a peace-loving gentleman like myself into plenty of trouble.

I was not so trusting as to believe that Inspector Daly had made his last attempt at interrogating me. just as soon as he recovered from the kick in his multiplication machinery which I had given him, he was going to make another attempt to connect me up to the lighting system. I wondered if Daly was acting on his own, or if he had partners and I guessed he was alone, taking opportunity as it presented itself.

I parked the pick-up in the yard and went through on to the veranda of my shack. Missus Chubby had been out to sweep and tidy while I was away. There were fresh flowers in a jam-jar on the dining-room table - but more important there were eggs and bacon, bread and butter in the icebox.

I stripped off my blood-stained shirt and dressing. There were thick raised welts around my chest that the cane had left, and the wounds were a mess.

I showered and strapped on a fresh dressing, then, standing naked over the stove, I scrambled a pan full of eggs with bacon and while it cooked, I poured a very dark whisky and took it like medicine.

I was too tired to climb between the sheets, and as I fell across the bed I wondered if I would be fit enough to work the night run on schedule. It was my last thought before sun-up.

And after I had showered again and swallowed two Doloxene painkillers with a glass of cold pineapple juice and eaten another panful of eggs for breakfast I thought the answer was yes. I was stiff and sore, but I could work. At noon I drove into town, stopped off at Missus Eddy’s store for supplies and then went on down to Admiralty.

Chubby and Angelo were on board already, and Dancer lay against the wharf.

“I filled the auxiliary tariks, Harry,” Chubby told me. “She’s good for a thousand miles.”

“Did you break out the cargo nets?” I asked, and he nodded.

“They are stowed in the main sail locker.” We would use the nets to deck load the bulky ivory cargo.

“Don’t forget to bring a coat - it will be cold out on the stream with this wind blowing-“

“Don’t worry, Harry. You the one should watch it. Man, you look bad as you were ten days ago. You look real sick.”

“I feel beautiful, Chubby.”

“Yeah,” he grunted, “like my motherin-law,” then he changed the subject. “What happened to your carbine, man?”

“The police are holding it.”

“You mean we going out there without a piece on board?”

“We never needed it yet.”

“There is always a first time,” he grunted. “I’m going to feel mighty naked without it.”

Chubby’s obsession with armaments always amused me. Despite all the evidence that I presented to the contrary, Chubby could never quite shake, off the belief that the velocity and range of a bullet depended upon how hard one pulled the trigger - and Chubby intended that his bullets go very fast and very far indeed.

The savage strength with which he sent them on their way would have buckled a less robust weapon than the FN. He also suffered from a complete inability to keep his eyes open at the moment of firing.

I have seen him miss a fifteen-foot tiger shark at a range of ten feet with a full magazine of twenty rounds. Chubby Andrews was never going to make it to Bisley, but he just naturally loved firearms and things that went bang.

“It will be a milk run, a ruddy pleasure cruise, Chubby, you’ll see,” and he crossed his fingers to avert the hex, and shuffled off to work on Dancer’s already brilliant brasswork, while I went ashore.

The front office of Fred Coker’s travel agency was deserted and I rang the bell on the desk. He stuck his head through from the back room.

“Welcome, Mister Harry.” He had removed his coat and tie and had rolled up his shirt sleeves, about his waist he wore a red rubber apron. “Lock the front door, please, and come through.”

The back room was in contrast to the front office with its gaudy wallpaper and bright travel posters. It was a long, gloomy barn. Along one wall were piled cheap pine coffins. The hearse was parked inside the double doors at the far end. Behind a grimy canvas screen in one corner was a marble slab table with guttering around the edges and a spout to direct fluid from the guttering into a bucket on the floor.

“Come in, sit down. There is a chair. Excuse me if I carry on working while we talk. I have to have this ready for four o’clock this afternoon.”

I took one look at the frail naked corpse on the slab. It was a little girl of about six years of age with long dark hair. One look was enough and I moved the chair behind the screen so I could see only Fred Coker’s bald head, and I lit a cheroot. There was a heavy smell of embalming fluid in the room, and it caught in my throat.

“You get used to it, Mister Harry.” Fred Coker had noticed my distaste.

“Did you set it up?” I didn’t want to discuss his gruesome trade.

“It’s fixed,” he assured me.

“Did you square our friend at the fort?”

“It’s all fixed.”

“when did you see him!” I persisted, I wanted to know about Daly.

I was very interested in how Daly felt.

“I saw him this morning, Mister Harry.”

“How was he?”

“He seemed all right.” Coker paused in his grisly task and looked at me questioningly.

“Was he standing up, walking around, dancing a jig, singing, tying the dog loose?”

“No. He was sitting down, and he was not in a very good mood “It figures.” I laughed and my own injuries felt better. “But he took the pay off?”

“Yes, he took it.”

“Good, then we have still got a deal.” “Like I told you, it’s all fixed.”

“Lay it on me, Mr. Coker.”

“The pick up is at the mouth of the Salsa stream where it enters the south channel of the main Duza estuary.” I nodded, that was acceptable. There was a good channel and the holding ground off the Salsa was satisfactory.

“The recognition signal will be two lanterns - one over the other, placed on the bank nearest the mouth. You will flash twice, repeated at thirty-second intervals and when the lower lantern is extinguished you can anchor. Got that?”

“Good.” It was all satisfactory.

“They will provide labour to load from the lighters.” I nodded, then asked. “They know that slack water is three o’clock - and I must be out of the channel before that?” “Yes, Mister Harry. I told them they must finish loading before two hundred hours.”

“All right then - what about the drop off?”

“Your drop off will be twenty-five miles due east of Rastafa Point.”

“Fine.” I could check my bearings off the lighthouse at Rastafa.

It was good and simple.

“You will drop off to a dhow-rigged schooner, a big one. Your recognition signal will be the same. Two lanterns on the mast, you will flash twice at thirty seconds, and the lower lamp will extinguish. You can then off load. They will provide labour and will put down an oil slick for you to ride in. I think that is all.”

“Except for the money.”

“Except for the money, of course.” He produced an envelope from the front pocket of his apron. I took it gingerly between thumb and forefinger and glanced at his calculations scribbled in ballpoint on the envelope.

“Half up front, as usual, the rest on delivery,” he pointed out.

That was thirty-five hundred, less twenty-one hundred for Coker’s commission and Daly’s pay-off. It left fourteen hundred, out of which I had to find the bonus for Chubby and Angelo - a thousand dollars - not much over.

I grimaced. “I’ll be waiting outside your office at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, Mr. Coker.”

“I’ll have a cup of coffee ready for you, Mister Harry.” “That had better not be all,” I told him, and he laughed and stooped once more over the marble slab.

We cleared Grand Harbour in the late afternoon, and I made a fake run down the channel towards Mutton Point for the benefit of a possible watcher with binoculars on Coolie Peak. As darkness fell, I -came around on to my true heading, and we went in through the inshore channel and the islands towards the wide tidal mouth of the Duza River.

There was no moon but the stars were big and the break of surf flared with phosphorescence, ghostly green in the afterglow of the setting sun.

I ran Dancer in fast, picking up my marks successively the loom of an atoll in the starlight, the break of a reef, the very run and chop of the water guided me through the channels and warned of shoals and shallows.

Angelo and Chubby huddled beside me at the bridge rail.

Occasionally one of them would go below to brew more of the powerful black coffee, and we sipped at the steaming mugs, staring out into the night watching for a flash of paleness that was not breaking water but the hull of a patrol boat.

Once Chubby broke the silence. “Hear from Wally you had some trouble up at the fort last night.”

“Some, I agreed.

“Wally had to take him up to the hospital afterwards.”

“Wally still got his job?” I asked.

“Only just. The man wanted to lock him up but Wally was too big.”

Angelo joined in. “Judith was up at the airport at lunch time.

Went up to fetch a crate of school books, and she saw him going out on the plane to the mainland.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Inspector Daly, he went across on the noon plane.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Didn’t think it was important Harry. “No, I agreed. “Perhaps it isn’t.”

There were a dozen reasons why Daly might go out to the mainland, none of them remotely connected with my business. Yet it made me feel uneasy - I didn’t like that kind of animal prowling around in the undergrowth when I was taking a risk.

“Wish you’d brought that piece of yours, Harry,” Chubby repeated mournfully, and I said nothing but wished the same.

The flow of the tide had smoothed the usual turmoil at the entrance to the southern channel of the Duza and I groped blindly for it in the dark. The mud banks on each side were latticed with standing fish traps laid by the tribal fishermen, and they helped to define the channel at last.

When I was sure we were in the correct entrance, I killed both engines and we drifted silently on the incoming tide. All of us listened with complete concentration for the engine beat of a patrol boat, but there was only the cry of a night heron and the splash of mullet leaping in the shallows.

Ghost silent, we were swept up the channel; on each side the dark masses of mangrove trees hedged us in and the smell of the mud swamps was rank and fetid on the moisture-laden air.

The starlight danced in spots of light on the dark agitated surface of the channel, and once a long narrow dugout canoe slid past us like a crocodile, the phosphorescence gleaming on the paddles of the two fishermen returning from the mouth. They paused to watch us for a moment and then drove on without calling a greeting, disappearing swiftly into the gloom.

“That was bad,” said Angelo.

“We will be drinking a lager in the Lord Nelson before they could tell anyone who matters.” I knew that most of the fishermen on this coast kept their own secrets, close with words like most of their kind. I was not perturbed by the sighting.

Looking ahead I saw the first bend coming up, and the current began to push Dancer out towards the far bank. I hit the starter buttons, the engines murmured into life, and I edged back into the deep water.

We worked our way up the snaking channel, coming out at last into the broad placid reach where the mangrove ended and firm ground rose gently on each side.

A mile ahead I saw the tributary mouth of the Salsa as a dark break in the bank, screened by tall stands of fluffy headed reeds. Beyond it the twin signal lanterns glowed yellow and soft, one upon the other.

“What did I tell you, Chubby, a milk run.”

“We aren’t home yet.” Chubby the eternal optimist. “Okay, Angelo.

Get up on the bows. I’ll tell you when to drop the hook.”

We crept on down the channel and I found the words of the nursery rhyme running through my mind as I locked the wheel and took the hand spotlight from the locker below the rail.

“Three, Four, knock at the door, Five, Six, pick up sticks.” I thought briefly of the hundreds of great grey beasts that had died for the sake of their teeth - and I felt a draught of guilt blow coldly along my spine at my complicity in the slaughter. But I turned my mind away from it by lifting the spotlight and aiming the agreed signal upstream at the burning lanterns.

Three times I flashed the recognition code but I was level with the signal lanterns before the bottom one was abruptly extinguished.

“Okay, Angelo. Let her go,” I called softly as I killed the engines. The anchor splashed over and the chain ran noisily in the silence. Dancer snubbed up, and swung around at the restraint of the anchor, facing back down the channel.

Chubby went to break out the cargo nets for loading, but I paused by the rail, peering across at the signal lantern. The silence was complete, except for the clink and croak of the swamp frogs in the reed banks of the Salsa.

In that silence I felt more than heard the beat like that of a giant’s heart. It came in through the soles of my feet rather than my ears.

There is no mistaking the beat of an Allison marine diesel. I knew that the old Second World War Rolls-Royce marines had been stripped out of the Zinballa crash boats and replaced by Allisons, and right now the sound I was feeling was the idling note of an Allison marine.

“Angelo,” I tried to keep my voice low, but at the same time transmit my urgency. “Slip the anchor. For Christ’s sake! Quick as you can.”

For just such an emergency I had a shackle pin in the chain, and I thanked the Lord for that as I dived for the controls.

As I started engines, I heard the thump of the fourpound hammer as Angelo drove out the pin. Three times he struck, and then I heard the end of the chain splash overboard.

“She’s gone, Harry,” Angelo called, and I threw Dancer in to drive and pushed open the throttles. She bellowed angrily and the wash of her propellers spewed whitely from below her counter as she sprang forward.

Although we were facing downstream, Dancer had a fiveknot current running into her teeth and she did not jump away handily enough.

Even above our own engines I heard the Allisons give tongue, and from out of the reed-screened mouth of the Salsa tore a long deadly shape.

Even by starlight, I recognized her immediately, the widely flared. bows, and the lovely thrusting lines, greyhound waisted and the square chopped-off stern - one of the Royal Navy crash boats who had spent her best days in the Channel and now was mouldering into senility on this fever coast.

The darkness was kind to her, covering the rust stains and the streaky paintwork, but she was an old woman now. Stripped of her marvellous Rolls marines - and underpowered with the more economical Allisons. In a fair run Dancer would toy with her - but this was no fair run and she had all the speed and power she needed as she charged into the channel to cut us off, and when she switched on her battle lights they hit us like something solid. Two glaring white beams, blinding in their intensity so I had to throw up my hand to protect my eyes.

She was dead ahead now, blocking the channel, and on her foredeck I could see the shadowy figures of the gun crew crouching around the threepounder on its wide traversing plate. The muzzle seemed to be looking directly into my left nostril - and I felt a wild and desperate despair.

It was a meticulously planned and executed ambush. I thought of ramming her, she had a marine ply wooden hull, probably badly rotted, and Dancer’s fibreglass bows might stand the shock - but with the current against her Dancer was not making sufficient speed through the water.

Then suddenly a bullhorn bellowed elecamically from the dark behind the dazzling battle lights.

“Heave to, Mr. Fletcher. Or I shall be forced to fire upon you.

One shell from the threepounder would chop us down, and she was a quick firer. At this range they would smash us into a blazing wreck within ten seconds.

I closed down the throttles.

“A wise decision, Mr. Fletcher - now kindly anchor where you are,” the bullhorn squawked.

Okay, Angelo,” I called wearily, and waited while he rigged and dropped the spare anchor. Suddenly my arm was very painful again - for the last few hours I had forgotten about it.

“I said we should have brought that piece,” Chubby muttered beside me.

“Yeah, I’d love to see you shooting it out with that dirty great cannon, Chubby. That would be a lot of laughs.”

The crash boat manoeuvred alongside inexpertly, with gun and lights still trained on us. We stood helplessly in the blinding illumination of the battle lights and waited. I didn’t want to think, I tried to feel nothing - but a spiteful inner voice sneered at me.

“Say goodbye to Dancer, Harry old sport, this is where the two of you part company.”

There was more than a good chance that I would be facing a firing squad in the near future - but that didn’t worry me as much as the thought of losing my boat. With Dancer I was Mister Harry, the damnedest fellow on St. Mary’s and one of the top billfish men in the whole cockeyed world. Without her, I was just another punk trying to scratch his next meal together. I’d prefer to be dead.

The crash boat careered into our side, bending the rail and scraping off a yard of our paint before they could hook on to us.

“Motherless bastards,” growled Chubby, as half a dozen armed and uniformed figures poured over our side, in a chattering undisciplined rabble. They wore navy blue bell bottoms and bum-freezers with white flaps down the back of the neck, white and blue striped vests, and white berets with red porn-poms on the top - but the cut of the uniform was Chinese and they brandished long AK.47 automatic assault rifles with forward-curved magazines and wooden butts.

Fighting amongst themselves for a chance to get in a kick or a shove with a gun butt, they drove the three of us down into the saloon, and knocked us into the bench seat against the for’ard bulkhead. We sat there shoulder to shoulder while two guards stood over us with machineguns a few inches from our noses, and fingers curved hopefully around the triggers.

“Now I know why you paid me that five hundred dollars, boss,” Angelo tried to make a joke of it, and a guard screamed at him and hitt him in the face with the gun butt. He wiped his mouth, smearing blood across his chin, and none of us joked again.

The other armed seamen began to tear Dancer to pieces. I suppose it was meant to be a search, but they raged through her accommodation wantonly smashing open lockers or shattering the panelling.

One of them discovered the liquor cabinet, and although there were only one or two bottles, there was a roar of approval. They squabbled noisily as seagulls over a scrap of offal, then went on to loot the galley stores with appropriate hilarity and abandon. Even when their commanding officer was assisted by four of his crew to make the hazardous journey across the six inches of open space that separated the crash boat from Dancer, there was no diminution in the volume of shouting and laughter and the crash of shattering woodwork and breaking glass.

The commander wheezed heavily across the cockpit and stooped to enter the saloon. He paused there to regain his breath.

He was one of the biggest men I had ever seen, not less than six foot six tall and enormously gross - a huge swollen body with a belly like a barrage balloon beneath the white uniform jacket. The jacket strained at its brass buttons and sweat had soaked through at the armpits. Across his breast he wore a glittering burst of stars and medals, and amongst them I recognized the American Naval Cross and the 1918 Victory Star.

His head was the shape and colour of a polished black iron pot, the type they traditionally use for cooking missionaries, and a naval cap, thick with gold braid, rode at a jaunty angle upon it. His face ran with rivers of glistening sweat, as he struggled noisily with his breathing and mopped at the sweat, staring at me with bulging eyes.

Slowly his body began to inflate, swelling even larger, like a great bullfrog, until I grew alarmed - expecting him to burst.

The purple-black lips, thick as tractor tyres, parted and an unbelievable volume of sound issued from the pink cavern of his mouth.

“Shut up!” he roared. Instantly his crew of wreckers froze into silence, one of them with his gun butt still raised to attack the panelling behind the bar.

The huge officer trundled forward, seeming to fill the entire saloon with his bulk. Slowly he sank into the padded leather seat. Once more he mopped at his face, then he looked at me again and slowly his whole face lit up into the most wonderfully friendly smile, like an enormous chubby and lovable baby; his teeth were big and flawlessly white and his eyes nearly disappeared in the rolls of smiling black flesh.

“Mr. Fletcher, I can’t tell you what a great pleasure this is for me.” His voice was deep and soft and friendly, the accent was British upper class - almost certainly acquired at some higher seat of learning. His English was better than mine.

“I have looked forward to meeting you for a number of years.”

“That’s very decent of you to say so, Admiral.” With that uniform he could not rank less.

“Admiral,” he repeated with delight, “I like that,” and he laughed. It began with a vast shaking of belly and ended with a gasping and straining for breath. “Alas, Mr. Fletcher, you are deceived by appearances,” and he preened a little, touching the medals and adjusting the peak of his cap. “I am only a humble Lieutenant Commander.”

“That’s really tough, Commander.”

“No. No, Mr. Fletcher - do not waste your sympathy on me. I wield all the authority I could wish for.” He paused for deep breathing exercises and to wipe away the fresh ooze of sweat. “I hold the powers of life and death, believe me.” “I believe you, sir,” I told him earnestly. “Please don’t feel you have to prove your point.”

He shouted with laughter again, nearly choked, coughed up something large and yellow, spat it on to the floor and then told me, “I like you, Mr. Fletcher, I really do. I think a sense’of humour is very important. I think you and I could become very close friends.” I doubted it, but I smiled encouragingly.

“As a mark of my esteem you may use the familiar form when addressing me - Suleiman Dada.”

“I appreciate that - I really do, Suleiman Dada, and you may call me Harry.” “Harry,” he said. “Let’s have a dram of whisky together.” At that moment another man entered the saloon. A slim boyish figure, dressed not in his usual colonial police uniform but in a lightweight silk suit and lemon-coloured silk shirt and matching tie, with alligator-skin shoes on his feet.

The light blond hair was carefully combed forward into a cow’s lick, and the fluffy, moustache was trim as ever, but -he walked carefully, seeming to favour an injury. I grinned at him.

“So, how does the old ball-bag feel now, Daly?” I asked kindly, but he did not answer and went to sit across from Lieutenant Commander Suleiman Dada.

Dada reached out a huge black paw and relieved one of his men of the Scotch whisky bottle he carried, part of my previous stock, and he gestured to another to bring glasses from the shattered liquor cabinet.

When we all had half a tumbler of Scotch in our hands, Dada gave us the toast.

“To lasting friendship, and mutual prosperity.” We drank, Daly and I cautiously, Dada deeply and with evident pleasure. While his head was tilted back and his eyes closed, the crew man attempted to retrieve the bottle of Scotch from the table in front of him.

Without lowering the glass Dada hit him a mighty openhanded clout across the side of the head, a blow that snapped his head back and hurled him across the saloon to crash into the shattered liquor cabinet. He slid down the bulkhead and sat stunned on the deck, shaking his head dazedly. Suleiman Dada, despite his bulk, was a quick and fearsomely. powerful man, I realized.

He emptied the glass, set it down, and refilled it. He looked at me now, and his expression changed. The clown had disappeared, despite the ballooning rolls of flesh, I was confronting a shrewd, dangerous and utterly ruthless opponent.

“Harry, I understand that you and Inspector Daly were interrupted in the course of a recent discussion,” and I shrugged.

“All of us here are reasonable men, Harry, of that I am certain.” I said nothing, but studied the whisky in my glass with deep attention.

“This is very fortunate - for let us consider what might happen to an unreasonable man in your position.” He paused, gargled a little with a sip of whisky. Sweat had formed like a rash of little white blisters on his nose and chin. He wiped it away. “First of all, an unreasonable man might watch while his crew were taken out one at a time and executed. We use pickaxe handles here. It is a gruelling business, and Inspector Daly assures me that you have a special relationship with these two men.” Beside me Chubby and Angelo shifted uneasily in their seats. “Then an unreasonable man would have his boat taken in to Zinballa Bay. Once that happened there would be no way in which it would ever be returned to him. It would be officially confiscated, out of my humble hands.” He paused, and showed me the humble hands, stretching them towards me. They would have fitted a bull gorilla. We both stared at them for a moment. “Then the unreasonable man might find himself in Zinballa jail - which, as you are probably aware, is a maximum security political prison.”

I had heard of Zinballa prison, as had everyone on the coast.

Those who came out of it were either dead or broken in body and spirit.

They called it the “Lion Cage.

“Suleiman Dada, I want you to know that I am one of nature’s original reasonable men,” I assured him, and he laughed again.

“Iwas certain of it,” he said. “I can tell one a mile off,” then again he was serious. “If we leave here immediately, before the turn of the tide we can be out of the inshore channel before midnight.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “that we could.”

“Then you could lead us to this place of interest, wait while we satisfy ourselves as to your good faith - which I for one do not doubt one moment - you and your crew will then be free to sail away in your magnificent boat and you could sleep tomorrow night in your own bed.”

“Suleiman Dada - you are a generous and cultivated man. I also have no reason to doubt your good faith,” - no more than that of Materson and Guthrie, I silently qualified the statement - “and I have a peculiarly intense desire to sleep tomorrow night in my own bed.”

Daly spoke for the first time, snarling quietly under his little moustache. “I think you should know that a turtle fisherman saw your boat anchored in the lagoon across the channel from the Old Men and Gunfire Reef on the night before the shooting incident - we will expect to be taken that way.”

“I have nothing against a man who takes a bribe, Daly God knows I have done so myself - but then where is the honour among thieves that the poet sings of? I was very. disappointed in Daly, but he ignored my recriminations.

“Don’t try any more of your tricks,“he warned me.

“You really are a champion turd, Daly. I could win prizes with you.”

“Please, gentlemen.” Dada held up his hands to halt my flow of rhetoric. “Let us all be friends. Another small glass of whisky - and then Harry will take us all on a tour of interest.” Dada topped up our glasses, and paused before drinking again. “I think I should warn you, Harry - I do not like rough water. It does not agree with me. If you take me into rough water I shall be very very angry. Do we understand each other?”

“Just for you I shall command the waters to stand still, Suleiman Dada,” I assured him, and he nodded solemnly, as though it was the very least he expected.

The dawn was like a lovely woman rising from the couch of the sea, soft flesh tones and pearly light, the cloud strands like her hair tresses flowing and tousled, gilded blonde by the early sunlight.

We ran northwards, hugging the quieter waters of the inshore channel. Our order of sailing placed Wave Dancer in the van, she ambled along like a blood filly mouthing the snaffle, while half a mile astern the crash boat waddled and wallowed, as the Allisons tried to push her up on to the plane. We were headed for the Old Men and Gunfire Reef.

On board Dancer I had the con, standing alone at the wheel upon the open bridge. Behind me stood Peter Daly, and an armed seaman from the crash boat.

In the saloon below us, Chubby and Angelo still sat on the bench seat and three more seamen, armed with assault rifles, kept them there.

Dancer had been looted of all her galley stores, so none of us had breakfasted, not even a cup of coffee.

The first paralysing despair of capture had passed - and I was now thinking frenetically, trying to plot my way out of the maze in which I was trapped.

I knew that if I showed Daly and Dada the break at Gunfire Reef they would either explore it and find nothing - which was the most likely for whatever had been there was now packaged and deposited at Big Gull Island - or they would find some other evidence at the break. In both cases I was in for unpleasantness - if they found nothing Daly would have the very great pleasure of connecting me up to the electrical system in an attempt to make me talk.

If they found something definite my presence would become superfluous - and a dozen eager seamen would vie for the job of executioner. I didn’t like the sound of pick-handles it promised to be a messy business.

Yet the chances of escape seemed remote. Although she was half a mile astern the threepounder of the foredeck of Dada’s crash boat kept us on an effective leash, and we had aboard Daly and four members of the goon squad.

I lit my first cheroot of the day and its effect was miraculous, almost immediately I seemed to see a pinprick of light at the end of the long dark tunnel. I thought about it a little longer, puffing quietly on the black tobacco, and it seemed worth a try - but first I had to talk to Chubby.

Daly,” I turned to speak over my shoulder. “You had better get Chubby up here to take the wheel, I have got to go below.” why? he demanded suspiciously. “What are you going to do?”

“Let’s just say that whatever it is happens every morning at this time, and nobody’else can do it for me. If you make me say more, I shall blush.”

“You should have been on the stage, Fletcher. You really slay me. V “Funny you should mention that. It had crossed my mind.”

He sent the guard to fetch Chubby from the saloon, and I handed the con to him.

“Stick around, I want to talk to you later,” I muttered out of the side of my mouth and clambered down into the cockpit. Angelo brightened a little when I entered the saloon, and flashed a good imitation of the old bright grin, but the three guards, clearly bored, turned their weapons on me enthusiastically and I raised my hands hurriedly.

“Easy, boys, easy,” I soothed them and sidled past them down the companionway. However, two of them followed me. When I reached the heads they would have entered with me and kept me company. “Gentlemen,” I protested, “if you continue to point those things at me during the next few critical moments you will probably pioneer the sovereign cure for constipation.” They scowled at me uncertainly and as I closed the door firmly upon them I added, “But you really don’t want a Nobel prize - do you?”

When I opened it again they were waiting in exactly the same attitudes, as though they had not moved. With a conspiratory gesture I beckoned them to follow. Immediately they showed interest, and I led them to the master cabin. Below the big double bunk I had spent many hours building in a concealed locker. It was about the size of a coffin, and was ventilated. It would accommodate a man lying prone. During the time when I was running human cargo it had been a hidey hole in case of a search - but now I used it as a store for valuables and illicit or dangerous cargo. It contained at the present time five hundred rounds of ammunition for the FN, a wooden crate of hand grenades, and two cases of Chivas Regal Scotch whisky.

With exclamations of delight the two guards slung their machineguns on their shoulder straps and dragged out the whisky cases. They had forgotten about me and I slipped away and returned to the bridge. I stood next to Chubby, delaying the moment of take-over.

“You took your time,” growled Daly.

“Never rush a good thing,” I explained, and he lost interest and strolled back to stare across our wake at the following gunboat.

“Chubby,” I whispered. “Gunfire Break. You told me once there was a passage through the reef from the landward side.”

“At high springs, for a whaleboat and a good man with a steady nerve,“he agreed. “I did it when I was a crazy kid.”

“It’s high spring in three hours. Could I run Dancer through?” I asked.

Chubby’s expression changed. “Jesus!” he whispered, and turned to stare at me in disbelief.

“Could I do it?” I insisted quietly, and he sucked his teeth noisily, looking away at the sunrise, scratching the bristles of his chin.

Then suddenly he reached an opinion, and spat over the side. “You might, Harry - but nobody else I know could.”

“Give me the bearings, Chubby, quickly.”

“It was a long time ago, but,” sketchily he described the approach, and the passage of the break, “there are three turns in the passage, left right then left again, then there is a narrow neck, brain coral on each hand - Dancer might just get through but she’ll leave some paint behind. Then you are into the big pool at the back of the main reef. There is room to circle there and wait for the right sea before you shoot the gap out into the open water.”

“Thanks, Chubby,” I whispered. “Now go below. I let the guards have the spare whisky. By the time I start my run for the break they will be blasted right out through the top of their skulls. I will signal three stamps on the deck, then it will be up to you and Angelo to get those pieces away from them and wrap them up tightly.”

The sun was well up, and the triple-peaked silhouette of the Old Men was rising only a few miles dead ahead when I heard the first raucous shout of laughter and crash of breaking furniture below. Daly ignored it and we ran on over the quiet inshore waters towards the reverse side of Gunfire “Reef. Already I could see the jagged line of the Reef, like the black teeth of an*ancient shark. Beyond it the tall oceanic surf flashed whitely as it burst, and beyond that lay the open sea.