The Golden Rendezvous

Chapter 10

I slept that night and slept deeply, as deeply, almost, as Tony Carreras. I had neither sedatives nor sleeping pills; exhaustion was the only drug I needed.

Coming awake next morning was a long, slow climb from the depths of a bottomless pit. I was climbing in the dark, but in the strange way of dreams I wasn’t climbing and it wasn’t dark; some great beast had me in his jaws and was trying to shake the life out of me. A tiger, but no ordinary tiger. A sabre-toothed tiger, the kind that had passed from the surface of the earth a million years ago. So I kept on climbing in the dark and the sabre-toothed tiger kept on shaking me like a terrier shaking a rat and I knew that my only hope was to reach the light above, but I couldn’t see any light. Then, all of a sudden, the light was there, my eyes were open, and Miguel Carreras was bending over me and shaking my shoulder with no gentle hand. I would have preferred the sabre-toothed tiger any day.

Marston stood at the other side of the bed and when he saw I was awake he caught me under the arms and lifted me gently to a sitting position. I did my best to help him but I wasn’t concentrating on it; I was concentrating on the lip-biting and eye-closing so that Carreras couldn’t miss how far through I was. Marston was protesting.

“He shouldn’t be moved, Mr. Carreras. He really shouldn’t be moved. He’s in constant pain and I repeat that major surgery is essential at the earliest possible moment.” It was about forty years too late now, I supposed, for anyone to point out to Marston that he was a born actor. No question in my mind now but that that was what he should have been: the gain to both the thespian and medical worlds would have been incalculable.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and smiled wanly. “Why don’t you say it outright, doctor? Amputation is what you mean. He looked at me gravely, then went away without saying anything. I looked across at Bullen and Macdonald. Both of them were awake, both of them carefully not looking in my direction. And then I looked at Carreras.

At first glance he looked exactly the same as he had a couple of days ago. At first glance, that was. A second and closer inspection showed the difference: a slight pallor under the tan, a reddening of the eyes, a tightening of the face that had not been there before. He had a chart under his left arm, a slip of paper in his left hand. “Well,” I sneered, “How’s the big bold pirate captain this morning?”

“My son is dead,” he said dully.

I hadn’t expected it to come like this, or so soon, but the very unexpectedness of it helped me to the right reaction, the reaction he would probably expect from me anyway. I stared at him through slightly narrowed eyes and said, “He’s what?” “Dead.” Miguel Carreras, whatever else he lacked, unquestionably had all the normal instincts of a parent, a father. The very intensity of his restraint showed how badly he had been hit. For a moment I felt genuinely sorry for him. For a very short moment. Then I saw the faces of Wilson and Jamieson and Benson and Brownell and Dexter, the faces of all those dead men, and I wasn’t sorry any more. “Dead?” I repeated. Shocked puzzlement, but not too much shock it wouldn’t be expected of me. “Your son? Dead? How can he be dead? What did he die of?”

Almost of its own volition, before I suddenly checked the movement, my hand started reaching for the clasp knife under the pillow. Not that it would have made much difference even if he had seen it five minutes in the dispensary steriliser had removed the last of the traces of blood.

“I don’t know.” he shook his head and I felt like cheering; there were no traces of suspicion in his face. “I don’t know.”

“Dr. Marston,” I said. “Surely you…”

“We haven’t been able to find him. He has disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” It was Captain Bullen making his contribution, and his voice sounded a shade stronger, a little less husky, than it had the previous night. “Vanished? A man just can’t vanish aboard a ship like that, Mr. Carreras.”

“We spent over two hours searching the ship. My son is not aboard the Campari. When did you last see him, Mr. Carter?”

I didn’t indulge in guilty starts, sharp upward glances, or anything daft like that. I wondered what his reactions would have been if I’d said: “when I heaved him over the side of the Campari last night.” Instead I pursed my lips and said, “After dinner last night when he came here. He didn’t linger. Said something like: ‘captain Carreras making his rounds,’ and left.”

“That is correct. I’d sent him to make a tour of inspection. How did he look?”

“Not his usual self. Green. Seasick.”

“My son was a poor sailor,” Carreras acknowledged. “It is possible — "

“You said he was making rounds,” I interrupted. “Of the whole ship? Decks and everything?”

“That is so.”

“Did you have life lines rigged on the fore and after decks?”

“No. I had not thought it necessary.”

“Well,” I said grimly, “There’s your possible answer. Your probable answer. No life lines, nothing to hang on to. Felt ill, ran for the side, a sudden lurch “ I left the sentence hanging.

“It is possible, but not in character. He had an exceptional sense of balance.” “Balance doesn’t help much if you slip on a wet deck.”

“Quite. I also haven’t ruled out the possibility of foul play.”

“Foul play?” I stared at him, duly grateful that the gift of telepathy is so very limited. “With all the crew and passengers under guard, lock and key, how is foul play possible? Unless,” I added thoughtfully, “there’s a nigger in your own woodpile.”

“I have not yet completed my investigations.” The voice was cold; the subject was closed, and Miguel Carreras was back in business again. Bereavement wouldn’t crush this man. However much he might inwardly mourn his son, it wouldn’t in the slightest detract from his efficiency or his ruthless determination to carry out exactly the plans he had made. It wasn’t, for instance, going to make the slightest difference to his plans to send us all into orbit the following day. Signs of humanity there might be, but the abiding fundamental in Carreras’ character was an utter, an all-excluding fanaticism that was all the more dangerous in that it lay so deeply hidden beneath the smooth urbanity of the surface. “The chart, Carter.” He handed it across to me along with paper giving a list of fixes. “Let me know if the Fort Ticonderoga is on course. And if she is running on time. We can later calculate our time of interception if and when I get a fix this morning.”

“You’ll get a fix,” Bullen assured him huskily. “They say the devil is good to his own, Carreras, and he’s been good to you. You’re running out of the hurricane and you’ll have clear patches of sky by noon. Rain later in the evening, but first clearing.”

“You are sure, Captain Bullen? You are sure we are running out of the hurricane?”

“I’m sure. Or, rather, the hurricane is running away from us.” old Bullen was an authority on hurricanes and would lecture on his pet subject at the drop of a hat, even to Carreras, even when a hoarse whisper was all the voice he could summon. “Neither wind nor sea have moderated very much” — and they certainly hadn’t ”but what matters is the direction of the wind. It’s from the northwest now, which means that the hurricane lies to the northeast of us. It passed us by to the east, on our starboard hand, sometime during the night, moving northwards, then suddenly swung northeast. Quite often when a hurricane reaches the northern limits of its latitude and then is caught up by the westerlies it can remain stationary at its point of recurvature for twelve or twenty-four hours — which would have meant that you would have had to sail through it. But you had the luck: it recurved and moved to the east almost without a break.” Bullen lay back, close to exhaustion. Even so little had been too much for him.

“You can tell all this just lying in your bed there?” Carreras demanded.

Bullen gave him the commodore’s look he would have given any cadet who dared question his knowledge and ignored him.

“The weather is going to moderate?” Carreras persisted.

“That’s obvious, isn’t it?” Carreras nodded slowly. Making his rendezvous in time and being able to tranship the gold had been his two great worries, and now both of them were gone he turned abruptly, walked out of the sick bay.

Bullen cleared his throat and said formally, in his strained whisper, “Congratulations, Mr. Carter. You are the most fluent liar I’ve ever known.”

Macdonald just grinned.

The forenoon, the afternoon came and went. The sun duly appeared, as Bullen had prophesied, and later disappeared, also as he had prophesied. The sea moderated, although not much, not enough, I guessed, to alleviate the sufferings of our passengers, and the wind stayed where it was, out of the northwest. Bullen, under sedation, slept nearly all day, once again relapsing into his incoherent mumblings — none of them, I was relieved to note, were about Tony Carreras while Macdonald and I talked or slept. But we didn’t sleep before I told him what I hoped to do that night when — or if I managed to get loose on the upper deck. Susan I hardly saw that day. She made her appearance after breakfast with her arm in plaster and in a sling.

There was no danger of this arousing any suspicion, even in a mind like Carreras’; the story was to be that she had gone to sleep in a chair, been flung out of it during the storm, and sprained her wrist. Such accidents were so commonplace in heavy weather that no one would think to raise an eyebrow. About ten o’clock in the morning she asked to be allowed to join her parents in the drawing room and stayed there all day.

Fifteen minutes after noon Carreras appeared again. If his investigations into possible foul play connected with his son’s death had made any progress, he made no mention of it; he did not even refer to the disappearance again. He had the inevitable chart — two of them this time — with him and the noon position of the Campari. Seemingly he’d managed to get a good fix from the sun. “Our position, our speed, their position, their speed, and our respective courses. Do we intercept at the point marked x?”

“I suppose you’ve already worked it out for yourself?”

“I have.”

“We don’t intercept,” I said after a few minutes. “At our present speed we should arrive at your rendezvous in between eleven and eleven and a half hours. Say midnight. Five hours ahead of schedule.”

“Thank you, Mr. Carter. My own conclusion exactly. The five-hour wait for the Ticonderoga won’t take long in passing.”

I felt a queer sensation in my middle; the phrase about a person’s heart sinking may not be physiologically accurate but it described the feeling accurately. This would ruin everything, completely destroy what little chance my plan ever had of succeeding. But I knew the consternation did not show in my face. “Planning on arriving there at midnight and hanging round till the fly walks into your parlour?” I shrugged. “Well, you’re the man who’s making the decisions.”

“What do you mean by that?” He asked sharply. “Nothing much,” I said indifferently. “It’s just that I would have thought that you would want your crew at the maximum stage of efficiency for transhipping the gold when we met the Fort Ticonderoga.”

“So?”

“So there’s still going to be a heavy sea running in twelve hours’ time. When we stop at the rendezvous, the Campari is going to lie in the trough of the seas and, in the elegant phrase of our times, roll her guts out. I don’t know how many of that crowd of landlubbers you have along with you were seasick last night, but I’ll bet there will be twice as many to-night. And don’t think our stabilisers are going to save you — they depend upon the factor of the ship’s speed for their effect.”

“A well-taken point,” he agreed calmly. “I shall reduce speed, aim at being there about four a.m.” He looked at me with sudden speculation. “Remarkably co-operative, full of helpful suggestions. Curiously out of the estimate I had formed of your character.”

“Which only goes to show how wrong your estimate is, my friend. Common sense and self-interest explain it. I want to get into a proper hospital as soon as possible — the prospect of going through life with one leg doesn’t appeal. The sooner I see passengers, crew, and myself transferred aboard the Ticonderoga the happier I’ll be. Only a fool kicks against the pricks; I know a fait accompli when I see one. You are going to transfer us all aboard the Ticonderoga, aren’t you, Carreras?”

“I shall have no further use for any member of the Campari’s crew, far less for the passengers.” he smiled thinly. “Captain teach and Blackbeard are not my ideals, Mr. Carter. I should like to be remembered as a humane pirate. You have my word that all of you will be transferred in safety and unharmed.” The last sentence had the ring of truth and sincerity, because it was true and sincere. It was the truth, but it wasn’t, of course, the whole truth: he’d left out the bit about our being blown out of existence half an hour later.

About seven o’clock in the evening Susan Beresford returned and Marston left, under guard, to dispense pills and soothing words to the passengers in the drawing room, many of whom were, after twenty-four hours of continuously heavy weather, understandably not feeling at their best.

Susan looked tired and pale — no doubt the emotional and physical suffering of the previous night together with the pain from her broken arm accounted for that — but I had to admit for the first time, in an unbiassed fashion, that she also looked very lovely. I’d never before realised that auburn hair and green eyes were a combination that couldn’t be matched, but possibly this was because I’d never before seen an auburn haired girl with green eyes.

She was also tense, nervous, and jumpy as a cat. Unlike old doc Marston and myself, she’d never have made it in the method school. She came softly to my bedside — Bullen was still under sedation and Macdonald either asleep or dozing — and sat down on a chair. After I’d asked her how she was and how the passengers were, and she’d asked me how I was and I’d told her and she hadn’t believed me, she said suddenly, “Johnny, if everything goes all right will you get another ship?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Well,” she said impatiently, “if the Campari’s blown up and we get away or if we’re saved some other way, will you…”

“I see. I suppose I would…”

“You’ll like that? Getting back to sea again?” This was a crazy conversation, but she was only whistling in the dark. I said, “I don’t think I’ll be back to sea again somehow.”

“Giving in?”

“Giving up. A different thing altogether. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life catering to the whims of wealthy passengers. I don’t include the Beresford family, father, mother and daughter.”

She smiled at this, going into the weird routine of melting the green in her eyes, the kind of smile that could have a very serious effect on the constitution of a sick man like myself, so I looked away and went on: “I’m a pretty fair mechanic and I’ve a bit of cash put away. There’s a very nice flourishing little garage down in Kent that I can take over any time I want. And Archie Macdonald there is an outstanding mechanic. We’d make a pretty fair team, I think.”

“Have you asked him yet?”

“What chance have I had?” I said irritably. “I’ve only just thought about it.”

“You’re pretty good friends, aren’t you?”

“Good enough. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Nothing, just nothing. Funny, that’s all. There’s the bo’sun — he’ll never walk properly again; nobody will want him at sea any more; he’s probably got no qualifications for any decent job on land — especially with that leg — and all of a sudden chief officer Carter gets tired of the sea and decides…”

“It’s not that way at all,” I interrupted. “You’ve got it all wrong.”

“Probably, probably,” she agreed. “I’m not very clever. But you don’t have to worry about him, anyway. Daddy told me this afternoon that he’s got a job for him.”

“Oh?” I took a chance and looked at her eyes again. “What kind of job?”

“A storeman.” “A storeman.” I know I sounded disappointed, but I’d have sounded ten times as disappointed if I had been able to take all this seriously, if I’d been able to share her belief that there was a future. “Well, it’s kind of him. Nothing wrong with a storeman, but I just don’t see Archie Macdonald as one, that’s all. Especially not in America.”

“Will you listen?” she asked sweetly. A touch of the Miss Beresford that was.

“I’m listening.”

“You’ve heard that daddy’s building a big refinery in the west of Scotland? Storage tanks, own port to take goodness knows how many tankers?”

“I’ve heard.”

“Well, that’s the place. Stores for the oil port and the refinery millions and millions of dollars of stores, daddy says, with goodness knows how many men to look after them. And your friend in charge with a dream house attached.”

“That is a very different proposition altogether. I think it sounds wonderful, Susan, just wonderful. It’s terribly kind of you.”

“Not me!” she protested. “Daddy.”

“Look at me. Say that without blushing.”

She looked at me. She blushed. With those green eyes the effect was devastating. I thought about my constitution again and looked away, and then I heard her saying: “daddy wants you to be the manager of the new oil port. So then you and the bo’sun would be in business together after all. Wouldn’t you?”

I turned slowly and stared at her. I said slowly, “Was that the job he meant when he asked me if I’d like to work for him?”

“Of course. And you didn’t give him a chance to tell you. Do you think he’d given up? He hadn’t really started. You don’t know my father. And you can’t claim I’d anything to do with it either.”

I didn’t believe her. I said, “I can’t tell you how — well, how grateful I am. It’s a terrific chance, I know and admit. If you see your father again this evening thank him very much indeed from me.”

Her eyes were shining. I’d never seen a girl’s eyes shining for me before. Not in this way.

“Then you’ll — then you’ll…”

“And tell him no.”

“And tell him…” “It’s a foolish thing to have pride, perhaps, but I’ve still got a little left.” I hadn’t meant my voice to sound so harsh; it just came out that way. “Whatever job I’ll get, I’ll get the one I found for myself, not one bought for me by a girl.” As a thumbs-down on a genuine and generous offer, I reflected bitterly, the refusal could have been more graciously phrased.

She looked at me, her face suddenly very still, said, “oh, Johnny,” in a curiously muffled voice, turned and buried her face half on the pillow, half on the sheets, her shoulders heaving, sobbing as if her heart would break.

I didn’t feel good at all. I could have walked under a five barred gate without opening it. I reached and touched her head awkwardly and said, “I’m terribly sorry, Susan. But just because I turn down…”

“It’s not that, it’s not that.” She shook her head in the pillow, voice more muffled than ever. “It was all make believe. No, not that, everything I said was true, but just for a few moments we — well, we weren’t here. We — we were away from the Campari; it was something that had nothing to do with the Campari. You — you understand.”

I stroked her hair. “Yes, Susan, I understand.” I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“It was like a dream.” I didn’t see where she came into the dream. “In the future. Away — away from this dreadful ship. And then you burst the dream and we’re back on the Campari. And no one knows what the end’s to be, except us — mummy, daddy, all of them, Carreras has them believing their lives will be spared.” She sobbed again, then said between sobs, “Oh, my dear. We’re just kidding ourselves. It’s all over. Everything’s over. Forty armed men and they’re prowling all over the ship. I saw them. Double guards everywhere — there are two outside this door. And every door locked. There’s no hope, there’s no hope. Mummy, daddy, you, me, all of us — this time tomorrow it will all be over. Miracles don’t happen any more.”

“It’s not all over, Susan.” I’d never make a salesman, I thought drearily; if I met a man dying of thirst in the Sahara I couldn’t have convinced him that water was good for him. “It’s never all over.” But that didn’t sound any better than my first attempt. I heard the creak of springs and saw Macdonald propped up on one elbow, thick black eyebrows raised in puzzlement and concern. The sound of her crying must have wakened him.

“It’s all right, Archie,” I said. “Just a bit upset, that’s all.”

“I’m sorry.” she straightened herself and turned her tearstained face in the bo’sun’s direction. Her breath was coming in the quick, short, indrawn gasps that are the aftermath of crying. “I’m terribly sorry. I woke you up. But there is no hope, is there, Mr. Macdonald?”

“‘Archie’ will do for me,” the bo’sun said gravely.

“Well, Archie.” she tried to smile at him through her tears. “I’m just a terrible coward.”

“And you spending all day with your parents and never once being able to tell them what you know? What kind of cowardice do you call that, miss?” Macdonald said reproachfully. “You’re not answering me,” she said in tearful accusation. “I am a west highlander, Miss Beresford,” Macdonald said slowly. “I have the gift of my ancestors, a black gift at times that I’d rather be without, but I have it. I can see what comes tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, not often, but at times I can. You cannot will the second sight to come, but come it does. I have seen what is to come many times in the past few years, and Mr. Carter there will tell you that I have never once been wrong.” This was the first I had ever heard of it; he was as fluent a liar as myself. “Everything is going to turn out well.”

“Do you think so, do you really think so?” there was hope in her voice now, hope in her eyes; that slow, measured speech of Macdonald’s, the rocklike steadiness of the dark eyes in that sun-weathered face, bespoke a confidence, a certainty, an unshakeable belief that was most impressive. There now, I thought, was a man who would have made a great salesman.

“I don’t think, Miss Beresford.” again the grave smile. “I know. Our troubles are almost at their end. Do what I do put your last cent on Mr. Carter here.”

He even had me convinced. I, too, knew that everything was going to turn out just fine, until I remembered who he was depending on. Me. I gave Susan a handkerchief and said, “go and tell Archie about that job.”

“You’re not going to trust your life to that thing?” there was horror in Susan’s face, panic in her voice as she watched me tie a bowline round my waist. “Why, it’s no thicker than my little finger.”

I could hardly blame her: that thin three stranded rope, no bigger than an ordinary clothesline, was hardly calculated to inspire confidence in anyone. It didn’t inspire much in me, even although I did know its properties.

“It’s nylon, miss,” Macdonald explained soothingly. “The very rope mountaineers use in the Himalayas — and you don’t think they’d trust their lives to anything they weren’t dead sure of? You could hang a big motorcar on the end of this and it still wouldn’t break.”

Susan gave him her it’s all-right for you to talk when it’s not your life that’s depending on it look, bit her lip, and said nothing. The time was exactly midnight. If I’d read the clock dial settings on the twister properly, six hours was the maximum delayed action that could be obtained. Assuming Carreras rendezvoused exactly on time at 5 a.m., it would be at least another hour before he could get clear; so the twister wouldn’t be armed until after midnight. Everything was ready. The sick-bay door had been cautiously locked on the inside with the key I’d taken from Tony Carreras so that neither of the two guards could burst in unexpectedly in the middle of things. And even if they did get suspicious and force an entrance, Macdonald had a gun.

Macdonald himself was now sitting at the top of my bed, beside the window. Marston and I had half carried him there from his own bed. His left leg was quite useless like myself, he’d been given an injection by doc Marston to deaden the pain, mine being twice as powerful as the previous night’s dose but then Macdonald was not going to be called upon to use his leg that night, only his arms and shoulders, and there was nothing wrong with Macdonald’s arms and shoulders. They were the strongest on the Campari. I had the feeling I was going to need all their strength. Only Macdonald knew the purpose I had in mind. Only Macdonald knew that I intended returning the way I went. The others believed in my suicidal plan for an attack on the bridge, believed if I were successful I would be returning via the sick-bay door. But they didn’t believe I would return at all. The atmosphere was less than festive.

Bullen was awake now, lying flat on his back, his face silent and grim.

I was dressed in the same dinner suit as I’d worn the previous night. It was still damp, still crusted with blood. I’d no shoes on. The clasp knife was in one pocket, oil skin wrapped torch in the other, the mask round my face, hood over my head. My leg ached, I felt as a man feels after a long bout of flu, and the fever still burned in my blood, but I was as ready as I was ever going to be. “Lights,” I said to Marston.

A switch clicked and the sick bay was as dark as the tomb. I drew back the curtains, pulled open the window, and secured it on the latch.

I stuck my head outside.

It was raining steadily, heavily, a cold driving rain out of the northwest, slanting straight in through the window on to the bed. The sky was black with no star above. The Campari still pitched a little, rolled a little, but it was nothing compared to the previous night. She was doing about twelve knots. I twisted my neck and peered upwards. No one there. I leaned out as far as possible and looked fore and aft. If there was a light showing on the Campari that night, I couldn’t see it.

I came inside, stooped, picked up a coil of nylon rope, checked that it was the one secured to the iron bedstead, and flung it out into the rain and the darkness. I made a last check of the rope knotted round my waist — this was the one the bo’sun held in his hands — and said, “I’m off.”

As a farewell speech it could perhaps have been improved upon, but it was all I could think of at the time. Captain Bullen said, “good luck, my boy.” He’d have said an awful lot more if he knew what I really had in mind. Marston said something I couldn’t catch. Susan said nothing at all. I wriggled my way through the window, favouring my wounded leg, and then was fully outside, suspended from the sill by my elbows. I could sense rather than see the bo’sun by the window, ready to pay out the rope round my waist.

“Archie,” I said softly, “give me that spiel again. The one about how everything is going to turn out all right.”

“You’ll be here again before we know you’re gone,” he said cheerfully. “See and bring my knife back.”

I felt for the rope attached to the bed, got it in both hands, eased my elbows off the sill, and dropped quickly, hand over hand, as Macdonald played out my life line. Five seconds later I was in the water. The water was dark and cold and it took my breath away. After the warmth of the sick bay the shock of the almost immediate transition, the abrupt drop in temperature, was literally paralysing. Momentarily, involuntarily, I lost my grip on the rope, panicked when I realised what had happened, floundered about desperately, and caught it again. The bo’sun was doing a good job above: the sudden increase in weight as I’d lost my life line must have had him halfway out of the window.

But the cold wasn’t the worst. If you can survive the initial shock you can tolerate the cold to a limited degree, accustomed but not reconciled; what you can’t tolerate, what you can’t become accustomed to is the involuntary swallowing of large mouthfuls of salt water every few seconds. And that was what was happening to me.

I had known that being towed alongside a ship doing twelve knots wasn’t going to be any too pleasant, but I had never thought it was going to be as bad as this. The factor I hadn’t taken into the reckoning was the waves. One moment I was being towed, face down and planning, up the side of a wave; the next, as the wave swept by under me, I was almost completely out of the water, then falling forwards and down wards to smash into the rising shoulder of the next wave with a jarring violence that knocked all the breath from my body. And when all the breath has been driven from you the body’s demands that you immediately gulp in air are insistent, imperative, and not to be denied. But with my face buried in the sea I wasn’t gulping in air, I was gulping down large quantities of salt water. It was like having water under high pressure forced down my throat by a hose. I was floundering, porpoising, twisting and spinning exactly like a hooked fish being pulled in on the surface through the wake of a fast-trolling motorboat. Slowly, but very surely, I was drowning.

I was beaten before I started. I knew I had to get back, and at once. I was gasping and choking on sea water; my nostrils were on fire with it; my stomach was full of it; my throat burned with it, and I knew that at least some of it had already reached my lungs.

A system of signals had been arranged, and now I began to tug frantically on the rope round my waist, hanging on to the other rope with my left hand. I tugged half a dozen times, slowly, in some sort of order at first, then, as no response came, frantically, despairingly. I was porpoising up and down so violently that all Macdonald could be feeling anyway was a constant and irregular series of alternate tightenings and slackenings of the line; he had no means of distinguishing between one type of tug and another.

I tried to pull myself back on my own line, but against the onrushing pressure of the water as the Campari ploughed through that stormy sea it was quite impossible. When the tension came off the line round my waist, it needed all the strength of both my hands just to hang on to the life line without being swept away. With all the strength and desperation that was in me I tried to edge forward an inch. But I couldn’t even make that inch. And I knew I couldn’t hang on much longer. Salvation came by sheer chance, no credit to me. One particularly heavy wave had twisted me round till I was on my back, and in this position I fell into the next trough and hit the following wave with back and shoulders. Followed the inevitable explosive release of air from my lungs, the just as inevitable sucking in of fresh air — and this time I found I could breathe! air rushed into my lungs, not water: I could breathe! Lying on my back like this, half lifted out of the water by my grip on the life line, and with my head bent forward almost to my chest between my overhead arms, my face remained clear of the water and I could breathe.

I wasted no time but went hand over hand down the life line as fast as Macdonald paid out the rope about my waist. I was still swallowing some water but not enough to matter. After about fifteen seconds I took my left hand off the life line and started scraping it along the side of the ship, feeling for the rope I’d left dangling over the side of the afterdeck last night. The life line was now sliding through my right hand and, wet though it was, it was burning the skin of my palm. But I hardly noticed it. I had to find that Manilla I’d left tied to the guardrail stanchion; if I didn’t, then it was curtains. Not only would the hopes of my carrying out my plan be at an end; it would be the end for me also. Macdonald and I had had to act on the assumption that the rope would be there and no attempt would be made to pull me back until he got the clear prearranged signal that it was time to begin just that.

And to make any such clear signal while in the water, I had discovered, was impossible. If the Manilla wasn’t there I’d just be towed along at the end of that nylon rope until I was drowned. Nor would that take long. The salt water I’d swallowed, the violent buffeting of the waves, the blows I’d suffered from being flung a score of times against the iron walls of the Campari, the loss of blood and my injured leg — all those had taken their frightening toll and I was dangerously weak. It would not be long.

My left hand brushed against the Manilla: I grabbed it, a drowning man seizing the last straw in the wide, endless expanse of the ocean.

Tucking the life line through the rope round my waist, I over armed myself up the Manilla till I was all but clear of the water, wrapped my one good leg round the rope and hung there, gasping like an exhausted dog, shivering and then being violently sick as I brought up all the sea water that had collected in my stomach. After that I felt better but weaker than ever. I started to climb.

I hadn’t far to go, twenty feet and I’d be there, but I hadn’t gone two feet before I was bitterly regretting the fact that I hadn’t followed my impulse of the previous night and knotted the Manilla. The Manilla was soaking wet and slippery and I had to clasp tight with all the strength of my hands to get any purchase at all. And there was little enough strength left in my hands, my aching forearm muscles were exhausted from clinging so long and so desperately to the life line, my shoulders were just as far gone; even when I could get a good purchase, even when my weakening hands didn’t slide down the rope when I put all my weight on them, I could till pull myself up only two or three inches at a time. Three inches, no more: that was all I could manage at one time.

I couldn’t make it; reasons, instinct, logic, common sense ill told me that I couldn’t make it, but I made it. The last two feet of the climb was something out of a dark nightmare, hauling myself up two inches, slipping back an inch, hauling myself up again and always creeping nearer the top. Three feet from the top I stopped: I knew I was only that distance way from safety, but to climb another inch on that rope was something I knew I could never do. Arms shaking from the strain, shoulders on fire with agony, I hauled my body up until my eyes were level with knotted hands: even in that almost pitchy darkness I could see the faint white blur of my gleaming knuckles. For a second I hung there, then flung my right hand desperately upwards. If I missed the coaming of the scuppers… But I couldn’t miss it. I had no more strength in me, I could never make such an effort again.

I didn’t miss it. The top joint of my middle finger hooked over the coaming and locked there, then my other hand was beside it, I was scrabbling desperately for the lowermost bar in the guardrails; I had to get it over, and over at once, or I’d fall back into the sea. I found the bar, had both hands on it, swung my body convulsively to the right till my sound foot caught the coaming, reached up to the next bar, reached the teak rail, half dragged, half slid my body over the top, and fell heavily on the deck on the other side.

How long I lay there, trembling violently in every weary muscle in my body, whooping hoarsely for the breath my tortured lungs were craving, gritting my teeth against the fire in my shoulders and arms, and trying not to let the red mist before my eyes envelop me completely, I do not know. It may have been two minutes, it may have been ten. Somewhere during that time I was violently ill again. And then slowly, ever so slowly, the pain eased a little, my breathing slowed, and the mists before my eyes cleared away, but I still couldn’t stop trembling. It was well for me that no five-year-old happened along the deck that night: he could have had me over the side without taking his hands out of his pockets.

I untied the ropes from my waist with numbed and fumbling and all but useless hands, tied them both to the stanchion just above the Manilla, pulled the life line till it was almost taut, then gave three sharp, deliberate tugs. A couple of minutes passed, then came three clearly defined answering tugs. They knew now I had made it. I hoped they felt better about it than I did. Not that that would be hard.

I sat there for at least another five minutes till some measure of strength came back to me, rose shakily to my feet, and padded across the deck to number four hold. The tarpaulin on the starboard forward corner was still secured. That meant there was no one down below. But I really hadn’t expected them to be there yet.

I straightened, looked all round me, then stood very still, the driving rain streaming down my sodden mask and soaking clothes. Not fifteen yards away from me, right aft, I had seen a red glow come and vanish in the darkness. Ten seconds passed, then the glow again. I’d heard of waterproof cigarettes, but not all that waterproof. But someone was smoking a cigarette, no question about that.

Like falling thistledown, only quieter, I drifted down in the direction of the glow. I was still trembling, but you can’t hear trembling. Twice I stopped to line up direction and distance by that glowing cigarette and finally stopped less than ten feet away from it.

My mind was hardly working at all or I’d never have dared to do it: a careless flick of a torch beam, say, and it would have been all over.

But no one flicked a torch. The red glow came again and I could now just make out that the smoker wasn’t standing in the rain. He was in the V-shaped entrance of a tarpaulin, a big tarpaulin draped over some big object. The gun, of course, the gun that Carreras had mounted on the afterdeck, with the tarpaulin serving the dual purpose of protecting the mechanism from the rain and concealing it from any other vessel they might have passed during the day.

I heard the murmur of voices. Not the smoker, but another two crouched somewhere inside the shelter of the tarpaulin.

That meant three people there. Three people guarding the gun. Carreras was certainly taking no chances with that gun. But why so many as three? You didn’t need three. Then I had it. Carreras hadn’t just been talking idly when he’d spoken of the possibility of foul play in connection with the death of his son. He did suspect it, but his cold, logical mind had told him that neither crew nor passengers of the Campari could have been responsible. If his son had met death by violence, then death could only have come from one of his own men. The renegade who had killed his son might strike again, might attempt to ruin his plans. And so three men on guard together. They could watch each other.

I left, skirted the hatch, and made my way to the bo’sun’s store. I fumbled round in the darkness, found what I wanted, a heavy marlinespike, and then was on my way, marlinespike in one hand, Macdonald’s knife in the other.

Dr. Caroline’s cabin was in darkness. I was pretty sure that the windows were uncurtained, but I left my torch where it was. Susan had said that Carreras’ men were prowling round the decks that night: the chance wasn’t worth it. And if Dr. Caroline wasn’t already in number four hold, then the chances were high indeed that he would only be in one other place in his bed, and bound to it hand and foot. I climbed up to the next deck and padded along to the wireless office. My breathing and pulse were almost back to normal now; the shaking had eased, and I could feel the strength slowly flooding back into my arms and shoulders. Apart from the constant dull ache in my neck where the sandbag merchant and Tony Carreras had been at work, the only pain I felt was a sharp burning in my left thigh where the salt water had got into the open wounds. Without the anaesthetic I’d have been doing a war dance. On one leg, of course.

The wireless office was in darkness. I leaned my ear against the door, straining to hear the slightest sound from inside, and was just reaching out a delicate hand for the doorknob when I just about had a heart attack. A telephone bell had gone off with a shatteringly metallic loudness not six inches from the ear I’d so hard pressed against the door. It jarred me rigid; for all of five seconds lot’s wife couldn’t even have hoped to compete with me, then I pussyfooted silently across the deck into the shelter of one of the life boats.

I heard the vague murmur of someone talking on the telephone, saw the light come on in the wireless office, the door open, and a man come out. Before he switched off the light I saw two things: I saw him bring a key from his right-hand trouser pocket, and I saw who it was, the artist with the machine gun who had killed Tommy Wilson and cut down all the rest of us. If I had to settle any more accounts that night, I hoped bleakly it would be with this man. He closed the door, locked it, and went down the ladder to “A” deck below. I followed him to the top of the ladder and stayed there. There was another man at the foot of the ladder, lit torch in hand, just outside Dr. Caroline’s cabin, and in the backwash of light from the cabin bulkhead I could see who it was. Carreras himself. There were two other men close by, and I could distinguish neither of them, but I was certain that one of them would be Dr. Caroline. They were joined by the radio operator and the four men moved off aft. I never thought of going after them. I knew where they were going.

Ten minutes. That was the detail the news broadcast about the disappearance of the twister had mentioned. There were only one or two men who could arm the twister, and it couldn’t be done in less than ten minutes. I wondered vaguely if Caroline knew he had only ten minutes to live. And that was all the time I had to do what I had to do. It wasn’t long.

I was coming down the ladder while Carreras’ swinging torch was still in sight. Three quarters of the way down, three steps from the bottom, I froze into immobility. Two men leaning into that driving rain — their black blurred shapes were barely distinguishable, but I knew it was two men because of the low murmur of voices — were approaching the foot of the ladder. Armed men — they were bound to be armed, almost certainly with the ubiquitous Tommy gun which seemed the standard weapon among the Generalissimo’s henchmen.

They were at the foot of the ladder now. I could feel the ache in my hands from the tension of my grip round marlinespike and opened clasp knife. Then suddenly they went veering off to the right, round the side of the ladder. I could have reached out and touched them both. I could see them almost clearly now, clearly enough to see that both had beards, and had I not been wearing the black hood and mask they would have been bound to see the white glimmer of my face. How they didn’t even see my shape standing there on the third bottom step was beyond me: the only reason I could think of was that they both had their heads lowered against the driving rain.

Seconds later I was inside the central passageway of “A” accommodation. I hadn’t poked my head round the outside passage door to see if the land was clear; after that escape I’d felt that nothing mattered; I’d just walked straight inside. The passageway was empty.

The first door on the right, the one opposite Caroline’s, was the entrance to Carreras’ suite. I tried the door. Locked. I walked down the passage to where Benson, the dead chief steward, had had his cubicle, hoping that the luxurious carpet underfoot was absorbent enough to soak up the water that was almost cascading off me. White, Benson’s successor, would have had a blue fit if he could have seen the damage I was doing.

The master key to the passengers’ suites was in its secret little cubby-hole. I removed it, went back to Carreras’ cabin, unlocked the door, and went inside, locking it behind me.

The lights were on throughout the suite. Carreras probably hadn’t bothered to switch them off when he’d left he wasn’t paying for the electricity. I went through the cabins, sending each door in turn flying open with the sole of my stockinged foot. Nothing? No one. I had one bad moment when I entered Carreras’ own sleeping cabin and saw this desperate hooded, crouched figure, dripping water, hands clenched round weapons, with wide, staring eyes and blood dripping down beside the left eye. Myself in a looking glass. I had seen prettier sights. I hadn’t been aware that I’d been cut; I supposed it must have been the result of one of the many knocks I’d had against the side of the Campari, opening up the wound in my head.

Carreras had boasted that he had a complete loading plan of the Fort Ticonderoga in his cabin. Nine minutes now, maybe even less. Where in the name of god would he keep the plan? I went through dressing tables, wardrobes, lockers, cupboards, bedside tables. Nothing. Nothing. Seven minutes.

Where, where would he keep it? Think, Carter, for heaven’s sake, think. Maybe Caroline was getting on with the arming of the twister faster than anyone had thought possible. How did anyone know, as the broadcast had said, that it took all of ten minutes to arm it? If the twister was such a secret and until it had been stolen it had been such a top-priority hush hush secret that no member of the public had known of its existence — or did anyone know it took ten minutes to arm it? How could anyone know? Maybe all it required was a twist here, a turn there. Maybe — maybe he was finished already… Maybe.

I put those thoughts to one side, drove them out of my mind, crushed them ruthlessly. That way lay panic and defeat. I stood stock-still and forced myself to think, calmly, dispassionately. I had been looking in all the most obvious places. But should I have been looking in the obvious places? After all, I’d gone through this cabin once before, looking for a radio; I’d gone through it pretty thoroughly, and I hadn’t seen any signs. He would have it hidden; of course he would have it hidden. He wouldn’t have taken a chance on anyone finding it, such as the steward whose daily duty it was to clean out his cabin, before his men had taken over the ship. No stewards on duty now, of course, but then he probably hadn’t bothered to shift it since the take-over. Where would he have hidden it where a steward wouldn’t stumble across it?

That ruled out all the furniture fittings, all the places I’d wasted time in searching. It also ruled out bed, blankets, mattresses but not the carpet! The ideal hiding place for a sheet of paper.

I almost threw myself at the carpet in his sleeping cabin. The carpets in the Campari’s accommodation were secured by press-button studs for ease of quick removal. I caught the corner of the carpet by the door, ripped free a dozen studs, and there it was right away, six inches in from the edge. A large sheet of canvas paper, folded in four, with “T.E.S. Fort Ticonderoga. Most secret” printed in one corner. Five minutes to go.

I stared at the paper until I had memorised its exact position relative to the carpet, picked it up, and smoothed it out. Diagrams of the Ticonderoga with complete stowage plans of the cargo. But all I was interested in was the deck cargo. The plan showed crates stacked on both fore and aft decks, and twenty of those on the foredeck were marked with a heavy red cross. Red for gold.

In a small careful hand Carreras had written on the side: “all deck cargo crates identical in size. Gold in waterproof, with welded steel boxes to float free in event of damage or sinking. Each crate equipped with yellow water stain.” I supposed this was some chemical which, when it came into contact with salt water, would stain the sea for a wide area around. I read on: “gold crates indistinguishable from general cargo. All crates stamped ‘Harms Worth amp; Holden Electrical Engineering Company.’ stated contents generators and turbines. Forward-deck cargo consigned to Nashville, Tennessee, exclusively turbines; afterdeck cargo consigned to Oakridge, Tennessee, exclusively generators. So marked. Forward twenty crates on forward deck gold.”

I didn’t hurry. Time was desperately short, but I didn’t hurry. I studied the plan, which corresponded exactly to Carreras’ observations, and I studied the observations themselves until I knew I would never forget a word of them. I folded and replaced the plan exactly as I had found it, pressed the carpet snap studs back into place, went swiftly through the cabins on a last check to ensure that I had left no trace of my passing: there were none that I could see. I locked the door and left.

The cold, driving rain was falling more heavily than ever now, slanting in across the port side, drumming metallically against the bulkheads, rebounding ankle-high off the polished wooden decks. On the likely enough theory that Carreras’ patrolling men would keep to the sheltered starboard side of the accommodation, I kept to the opposite side as I hurried aft: in my stockinged soles and wearing that black suit and mask no one could have heard or seen me at a distance of more than a few feet. No one heard or saw me; I heard or saw no one. I made no attempt to look, listen, or exercise any caution at all. I reached number four hold within two minutes of leaving Carreras’ cabin.

I needn’t have hurried. Carreras had made no attempt to replace the tarpaulin he’d had to pull back in order to remove the battens, and I could see straight down into the bottom of the hold. Four men down there, two holding powerful electric lanterns, Carreras with a gun hanging by his side, the lanky stooped form of Dr. Slingsby Caroline, still wearing that ridiculous white wig askew on his head, bent over the twister. I couldn’t see what he was doing.

It was like a nineteenth-century print of grave robbers at work. The tomb like depths of the hold, the coffins, the lanterns, the feeling of apprehension and hurry and absorbed concentration that lent an evilly conspiratorial air as the elements were there. And especially the element of tension, an electric tension you could almost feel pulsating through the darkness of the night. But a tension that came not from the fear of discovery but from the possibility that at any second something might go finally and cataclysmically wrong. If it took ten minutes to arm the twister, and obviously it took even longer than that, then it must be a very tricky and complicated procedure altogether. Dr. Caroline’s mind, it was a fair guess, would be in no fit state to cope with tricky and complicated procedures: he’d be nervous, probably badly scared; his hands would be unsteady; he was working, probably with inadequate tools, on an unstable platform by the light of unsteady torches, and even though he might not be desperate enough or fool enough to jinx it deliberately, there seemed to me, as there obviously seemed to the men down in the hold, that there was an excellent chance that his hand would slip. Instinctively I moved back a couple of feet until the opening of the hatch came between me and the scene below. I couldn’t see the twister any more, that made me quite safe if it blew up.

I rose to my feet and made a couple of cautious circuits of the hatch, the first close in, the second further out. But Carreras had no prowlers there: apart from the guards on the gun, the afterdeck appeared to be completely deserted. Returned to the port forward corner of the hatch and settled own to wait.

I hoped I wouldn’t have to wait too long. The sea water had been cold; the heavy rain was cold; the wind was cold; was soaked to the skin and was recurringly and increasingly object to violent bouts of shivering, shivering I could do nothing to control. The fever ran fiercely in my blood. Maybe the thought of Dr. Caroline’s hand slipping had something do with the shivering: whatever the reason, I’d be lucky get off with no more than pneumonia.

Another five minutes, and I took a second cautious peek own into the hold. Still at it. I rose, stretched, and began to pace softly up and down to ward off the stiffness and cramp that was settling down on my body, especially on the legs. Things went the way I hoped I couldn’t afford to have stiffness anywhere.

If things went the way I hoped. I peered down a third time into the hold and this time stayed in that stooped position, unmoving. Dr. Caroline had finished. Under the watchful eye and gun of the radio operator, he was screwing the brass plaqued lid back on the coffin while Carreras and the other man had the lid already off the next coffin and were bent over it, presumably fusing the conventional explosive inside; probably it was intended as a stand-by in case of the malfunction of the twister or, even more probably, in the event of the failure of the twister’s timing mechanism, it was designed to set it off by sympathetic detonation. I didn’t know, I couldn’t guess. And for the moment I was not in the slightest worried. The crucial moment had come. The crucial moment for Dr. Caroline. I knew as he was bound to know — that they couldn’t afford to let him live. He’d done all they required of him. He was of no further use to them. He could die any moment now. If they chose to put a gun to his head and murder him where he stood, there was nothing in the world I could do about it, nothing I would even try to do about it. I would just have to stand there silently, without movement or protest, and watch him die. For if I let Dr. Caroline die without making any move to save him, then only he would die; but if I tried to save him and failed and with only a knife and marlinespike against two submachine guns and pistols the chances of failure were 100 per cent — then not only Caroline but every member of the passengers and crew of the Campari would die also. The greatest good of the greatest number… Would they shoot him where he stood or would they do it on the upper deck?

Logic said they would do it on the upper deck. Carreras would be using the Campari for a few days yet; he wouldn’t be wanting a dead man lying in the hold, and there would be no point in shooting him down there and then carrying him up above when he could make the climb under his own steam and be disposed of on the upper deck. If I were Carreras, that is what I would have figured.

And that was how he did figure. Caroline tightened the last screw, laid down the screw driver, and straightened. I caught a glimpse of his face, white, strained, one eye twitching uncontrollably. The radio operator said, “Senor Carreras?”

Carreras straightened, turned, looked at him, then at Caroline, and nodded. “Take him to his cabin, Carlos. Report here afterwards.” I moved back swiftly as a torch shone vertically upwards from the hold. Carlos was already climbing the ladder. “Report here afterwards.” God, I’d never thought of so obvious a possibility! For a moment I panicked, hands clenched on my pitiful weapons, irresolute, paralysed in thought and action. Without any justification whatsoever I’d had the picture firmly in mind of being able to dispose of Caroline’s appointed executioner without arousing suspicion. Had Carlos, the radio operator, been under instructions to knock off the unsuspecting Caroline on the way forward, then carry on himself to his wireless office, then I might have disposed of him, and hours might have passed before Carreras got suspicious. But now he was in effect saying, “take him up top, shove him over the side, and come back and tell me as soon as you have done so.”

I could see the heavy rain slanting whitely through the wavering torch beam as Carlos climbed swiftly up the ladder. By the time he reached the top I was round the other side of the hatch coaming, lying flat on the deck.

Cautiously I hitched an eye over the top of the coaming. Carlos was standing upright on the deck now, his torch shining down wards into the hold. I saw Dr. Caroline’s white head appear, saw Carlos move back a couple of steps, and then Caroline, too, was over the top, a tall, hunched figure, pulling high his collar against the cold lash of the rain. I heard, but failed to understand, a quick, sharp command, and then they were moving off diagonally, Caroline leading, Carlos with his torch on him from behind, in the direction of the companionway leading up to “B” deck.

I rose to my feet, remained immobile. Was Carlos taking him back to his cabin after all? Had I been mistaken? Could it be I never finished the thought. I was running after them as quickly, as lightly, as silently as the stiffness in my left leg would permit. Of course Carlos was taking him in the direction of the companionway; had he marched him straight towards the rail Caroline would have known at once what awaited him, would have turned and hurled himself against Carlos with all the frantic savagery of a man who knows he is about to die.

Five seconds, only five seconds elapsed from the time I started running until I caught up with them. Five seconds, far too short a time to think of the suicidal dangers involved; far too short to think what would happen if Carlos should swing his torch round, if any of the three guards at the gun should happen to be watching this little procession, if either Carreras or his assistant in the hold should choose to look over the coaming to see how the problem of disposal was being attended to, far too little time to figure out what I was going to do when I caught up with Carlos.

And I was given no time to figure. I was only three or four feet away when, in the backwash of light from the torch, I saw Carlos reverse his grip on his Tommy gun, catch it by the barrel, swing it up high over his head. It had reached its highest point and was just started on the downswing when the blast of the heavy marlinespike caught him on the back of the neck with all my weight and fury behind it. I heard something crack, caught the Tommy gun out of his suddenly nerveless hand before it could crash to the deck, and made a grab for the torch. I missed. The torch struck the deck with a muffled thud — it must have been a ship’s rubber-composition issue, — rolled over a couple of times, and came to rest, its beam shining straight out over the edge of the ship. Carlos himself pitched heavily forward, struck Dr. Caroline, and the two of them fell against the lower steps of the companionway. “Keep quiet!” I whispered urgently. “Keep quiet if you want to live!” I dived for the torch, fumbled desperately for the switch, couldn’t find it, stuck the glass face against my jacket to kill the beam, finally located the switch and turned it off. “What in heaven’s name…”

“Keep quiet!” I found the trigger on the automatic pistol and stood there stock-still, staring aft into the darkness, in the direction of both the hold and the gun, striving to pierce the darkness, listening as if my life depended on it. Which it did. Ten seconds I waited. I had to move, I couldn’t afford to wait another ten seconds. Thirty seconds would have been enough and more for Carlos to dispose of Dr. Caroline: a few seconds after that and Carreras would start wondering what had happened to his trusty henchman.

I thrust gun and torch towards Caroline, found his hands in the darkness. “Hold these,” I said softly.

“What what is this?” An agonised whisper in the dark.

“He was going to smash your head in. Now shut up. You can still die. I’m Carter, the chief officer.” I’d pulled Carlos clear of the companionway where he’d held Caroline pinned by the legs and was going through his pockets as quickly as I could in the darkness. The key. The key to the wireless office. I’d seen him take it from his right-hand trouser pocket, but it wasn’t there any more. The left-hand one. Not there either. The seconds were rushing by. Desperately I tore at the patch pockets of his army-type blouse, and I found it in the second pocket. But I’d lost at least twenty seconds.

“Is’s he dead?” Caroline whispered.

“Are you worried? Stay here.” I shoved the key into a safe inner pocket, caught the guard by his collar, and started to drag him across the wet deck. It was less than ten feet to the ship’s rail. I dropped him, located the hinged section of the teak rail, fumbled for the catch, released it, swung the rail through 180 degrees, and snapped it back in its open position.

I caught the guard by his shoulders, eased the upper part of his body over the second rail, then tipped the legs high. The splash he made couldn’t have been heard thirty feet away. Certainly no one in number four hold or under the gun tarpaulin could possibly have heard anything.

I ran back to where Dr. Caroline was sitting on the lower steps of the companionway. Maybe he was just obeying the order I’d given him, but probably he was just too dazed to move anyway. I said, “quick, give me your wig.”

“What? What?” My second guess had been right. He was dazed.

“Your wig!” It’s no easy feat to shout in a whisper, but I almost made it.

“My wig? but but it’s glued on.”

I leaned forward, twisted my fingers in the temporary thatch, and tugged. It was glued on all right. The gasp of pain and the resistance offered to my hand showed he hadn’t been kidding: that wig felt as if it was riveted to his skull. It was no night for half measures. I clamped my left hand over his mouth and pulled savagely with my right. A limpet the size of a soup plate couldn’t have offered more resistance, but it did come off. I don’t know how much pain there was in it for him, but it certainly cost me plenty: his teeth almost met through the heel of my palm.

The machine gun was still in his hand. I snatched it away, whirled, and stopped, motionless. For the second time in a minute I could see rain slanting whitely through the vertical beam of a torch. That meant only one thing: someone was climbing up the ladder from the bottom of the hold.

I reached the ship’s side in three long steps, placed the wig in the scuppers, laid the gun on top of it, raced back to the companionway, jerked Dr. Caroline to his feet, and dragged him towards the bo’sun’s store, less than ten feet inboard from the companionway. The door was still less than halfway shut when Carreras appeared over the coaming, but his torch wasn’t pointing in our direction. I closed the door silently until only a crack remained.

Carreras was closely followed by another man, also with a torch. Both of them headed for the ship’s side. I saw the beam of Carreras’ torch suddenly steady on the opened rail, then heard the sharp exclamation as he bent forward and peered in the scuppers. A moment later he was erect again, examining the gun and the wig he held in his hand. I heard him say something short and staccato, repeated several times. Then he started talking rapidly to his companion, but it was in Spanish and I couldn’t get it. He then examined the inside of the wig, indicated something with the torch beam, shook his head in what might have been sorrow but was more probably exasperated anger, flung the wig over the side; and returned to the hold, taking the Tommy gun with him.

His companion followed.

“Our friend didn’t seem too happy,” I murmured.

“He’s a devil, a devil!” Dr. Caroline’s voice was shaking; only now was he beginning to realise the narrowness of his escape, how closely death had brushed him by. “You heard him. One of his own men dead and all he could call him was a crazy fool, and he just laughed when the other man suggested they turn the ship to look for him.”

“You understand Spanish?”

“Pretty well. He said something like: ‘just like that sadistic so-and-so to force Caroline to open the rail so that he could see what was coming to him.’ he thinks I turned on the guard, grabbed his gun, and that in the fight, before we both went overboard, my wig was torn off. There was a handful of my hair sticking to the underside of the wig, he says.”

“Sorry about that, Dr. Caroline.”

“Good God, sorry! You saved both our lives. Mine anyway. Sorry!” Dr. Caroline, I thought, was a pretty strong nerved person; he was recovering fast from the shock. I hoped his nerves were very strong indeed; he was going to need them all to survive the ordeal of the next few hours. “It was that handful of hair that really convinced him.”

I said nothing, and he went on: “please tell me exactly what is going on.” For the next five minutes, while I kept watch through that crack in the doorway, Dr. Caroline plied me with questions and I answered them as quickly and briefly as I could. He had a highly intelligent, incisive mind, which I found vaguely surprising, which in turn was a stupid reaction on my part: you don’t pick a dim-wit as the chief of development for a new atomic weapon. I supposed his rather comical-sounding name and the brief glimpse I’d had of him the previous night a man bound hand and foot to a four-poster and looking into a torch beam with wide and staring eyes looks something less than his best had unconsciously given me the wrong impression entirely. At the end of the five minutes he knew as much about the past developments as I did myself; what he didn’t know was what was to come, for I hadn’t the heart to tell him. He was giving me some details of his kidnap when Carreras and his companion appeared.

They replaced battens, tied the tarpaulins, and went forward without any delay. That meant, I supposed, that the fusing of the auxiliary time bombs in the other two coffins was complete. I unwrapped the torch from its oilskin covering, looked round the store, picked up a few tools, and switched off the light.

“Right,” I said to Caroline. “Come on.”

“Where?” he wasn’t keen to go anywhere, and after what he’d been through I didn’t blame him.

“Back down that hold. Hurry. We may have little enough time.”

Two minutes later, with the battens and tarpaulin pulled back into place as well as possible above us, we were on the floor of the hold. I needn’t have bothered bringing any tools; Carreras had left his behind him, scattered carelessly round. Understandably he hadn’t bothered to remove them: he would never be using those tools again.

I gave Caroline the torch to hold, selected a screw driver, and started on the lid of the brass plaqued coffin.

“What are you going to do?” Caroline asked nervously. “You can see what I’m doing.”

“For pity’s sake be careful! that weapon is armed!”

“So it’s armed. It’s not due to go until when?”

“Seven o’clock. But it’s unsafe, highly unsafe. It’s as unstable as hell. Good God, Carter, I know. I know!” his unsteady hand was on my arm, his face contorted with anxiety. “The development on this missile wasn’t fully completed when it was stolen. The fuse mechanism was only in an untried experimental state, and tests showed that the retaining spring on a trembler switch is far too weak. The twister is dead safe normally, but this trembler switch is brought into circuit as soon as it is armed.” “And?”

“A jar, a knock, the slightest fall — anything could overcome the tension of the spring and short-circuit the firing mechanism. Fifteen seconds later the bomb goes up.”

I hadn’t noticed until then, but it was much warmer down in that hold than it had been on deck. I raised a soaking sleeve in a half-witted attempt to wipe some sweat off my forehead.

“Have you told Carreras this?” the warmth was also affecting my voice, bringing it out as a harsh, strained croak.

“I told him. He won’t listen. I think — I think Carreras is a little mad. More than a little. He seems perfectly prepared to take a chance. And he has the twister tightly packed in cotton wool and blankets to eliminate the possibility of a jar.”

I gazed at him for a long moment without really seeing him, then got on with the next screw. It seemed much stiffer than the last one, but it was just possible that I wasn’t applying so much pressure as I had been before. For all that I had all the screws undone inside three minutes. Gently I slid off the lid, placed it to one side, slowly peeled back a couple of blankets, and there lay the twister. It looked more evil than ever.

I stood up, took the torch from Caroline, and said, “armed, eh?”

“Of course.”

“There are your tools. Disarm the bloody thing.”

He stared at me, his face suddenly empty of expression. “That’s why we’re here?”

“Why else? surely it was obvious? get on with it.”

“It can’t be done.”

“It can’t be done?” I caught him by the arm, not gently. “Look, friend, you armed the damned thing. Just reverse the process, that’s all.”

“Impossible.” finality in the voice. “When it’s armed, the mechanism is locked in position. With a key. The key is in Carreras’ pocket.”