The Golden Rendezvous

Chapter 12

When I awoke I was stiff and sore and still shivering. But it wasn’t the pain or the cold or the fever that had brought me up from the murky depths of that troubled sleep. It was noise, a series of grinding, creaking metallic crashes that echoed and shuddered throughout the entire length of the Campari as if she were smashing into an iceberg with every roll she took. I could tell from the slow, sluggish, lifeless roll that the stabilisers weren’t working: the Campari was stopped, dead in the water.

“Well, mister.” Bullen’s voice was a harsh grate. “Your plan worked, damn you. Congratulations. The Ticonderoga’s alongside.”

“Alongside?”

“Right alongside,” Macdonald confirmed. “Lashed alongside.”

“In this weather?” I winced as the two ships rolled heavily together in the trough of a deep swell, and I heard the harsh tearing scream of sound as topsides metal buckled and rended under the staggering weight of the impact. “It’ll ruin the paint work. The man’s mad.”

“He’s in a hurry,” Macdonald said. “I can hear the jumbo winch aft. He’s started transhipping cargo already.”

“Aft?” I couldn’t keep the note of excitement out of my voice, and everybody suddenly looked at me, curiosity in their eyes. “Aft? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, sir.”

“Are we tied bow to bow and stern to stern, or are we facing in opposite directions?”

“No idea.” Both he and Bullen were giving me very close looks, but there was a difference in the quality of the closeness. “Does it matter, Mr. Carter?” He knew damned well it did.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said indifferently. Not much it didn’t matter: only 150 million dollars, that was all it mattered.

“Where’s Miss Beresford?” I asked Marston. “With her folks,” he said shortly. “Packing clothes. Your kind friend Carreras is allowing the passengers to take one suitcase apiece with them. He says they’ll get the rest of their stuff back in due course — if anyone manages to pick up the Campari after he has abandoned it, that is.”

It was typical, I thought, of the man’s extraordinary thoroughness in all he did: by letting them pack some clothes and promising the eventual safe return of the remainder, he would eliminate from even the most suspicious minds the unworthy thought that perhaps his intentions towards the crew and passengers weren’t of the highest and the noblest. The phone rang. Marston picked it up, listened briefly, then hung up.

“Stretcher party in five minutes,” he announced.

“Help me dress, please,” I said. “My white uniform shorts and white shirt.”

“You you’re not getting up?” Marston was aghast. “What if”

“I’m getting up, dressing, and getting back to bed again,” I said shortly. “Do you think I’m daft? what’s Carreras going to think if he sees a man with a compound fracture of the thigh hopping briskly over the rail of the Ticonderoga?”

I dressed, stuck the screw driver under the splints on my left leg, and got back to bed again. I was no sooner there than the stretcher party appeared and all three of us, still blanket-wrapped, were lowered gently on to the stretchers. The six bearers stooped, caught the handles, and we were on our way.

We were carried straight aft along the main deck passage to the afterdeck. I saw the end of the passage approaching, the grey, cold dawn light replacing the warm electric glow of the passageway, and I could feel my muscles tense involuntarily. The Ticonderoga would be in sight in a few seconds along our starboard side, and I wondered if I would dare to look. Would we be tied bow to bow or bow to stern? Would I have won or lost? We came out on the afterdeck. I forced myself to look.

I’d won. Bow to bow and stern to stern. From my low elevation on the stretcher I couldn’t see much, but that I could see — bow to bow, stern to stern. That meant that the Campari’s after jumbo was unloading from the Ticonderoga’s afterdeck. I looked again and checked again and there was no mistake. Bow to bow, stern to stern. I felt like a million dollars. A hundred million dollars.

The Ticonderoga, a big cargo vessel, dark blue with a red funnel, was almost the same size as the Campari. More important, their afterdecks were almost the same height above the water, which made for ease of transfer of both cargo and human beings. I could count eight crates already aboard the afterdeck of the Campari: a dozen still to come.

The transfer of human livestock had gone even further: all of the passengers, as far as I could judge, and at least half of the Campari’s crew were already standing on the afterdeck of the Ticonderoga, making no move, except to brace themselves against the rolling of the ship; their stillness was encouraged by a couple of hard-faced characters in green jungle uniform, each with a machine pistol cocked. A third gunman covered two Ticonderoga seamen who were stationed at lowered guardrails to catch and steady men as they stepped or jumped from the afterdeck of the Campari to that of the Ticonderoga as the two ships rolled together. Two more supervised Ticonderoga crew members fitting slings to the crates still to be transferred. From where I lay I could see four other armed men — there were probably many more patrolling the decks of the Ticonderoga and four others on the afterdeck of the Campari. Despite the fact that most of them were dressed in a quasi uniform of jungle green, they didn’t look like soldiers to me: they just looked like what they were, hardened criminals with guns in their hands, cold eyed men with their history written in their faces by the lines of brutality and depravity. Although he was maybe a bit short on the side of aesthetic appreciation, there was no doubt but that Carreras picked his killers well.

The sky was low with grey tattered cloud stretching away to the grey indistinctness of a tumbled horizon; the wind, westerly now, was still strong, but the rain had almost stopped, no more than a cold drizzle, felt rather than seen. Visibility was poor, but it would be good enough to let Carreras see that there were no other ships in the vicinity, and the radarscope, of course, would be working all the time. But apparently the visibility hadn’t been good enough to let Carreras see three ropes still attached to the base of the guardrail stanchion on the port side. From where I lay I could see them clearly. To me they looked about the size of the cables supporting the Brooklyn bridge. I hastily averted my eyes.

But Carreras, I could now see, had no time to look round him anyway. He himself had taken charge of the transhipment of the crates, hurrying on both his own men and the crew of the Ticonderoga, shouting at them, encouraging them, driving them on with an unflagging, unrelenting energy and urgency which seemed strangely at variance with his normally calm, dispassionate bearing. He would, of course, be understandably anxious to have the transfer completed before any curious third ship might heave in sight over the horizon, but even so… And then I knew what accounted for all the nearly desperate haste: I looked at my watch.

It was already ten minutes past six. Ten past six! from what I’d gathered of Carreras’ proposed schedule for the transfer and from the lack of light in the sky I’d have put the time at no more than half-past five. I checked again, but no mistake. Six-ten. Carreras would want to be over the horizon when the twister went up he would be safe enough from blast and radioactive fallout, but heaven alone knew what kind of tidal wave would be pushed up by the explosion of such an underwater nuclear device — and the twister was due to go up in fifty minutes. His haste was understandable. I wondered what had held him up. Perhaps the late arrival of the Ticonderoga or the lapse of a longer period of time than he had expected in luring it alongside. Not that it mattered now.

A signal from Carreras and it was time for the stretcher cases to be transferred. I was the first to go. I didn’t much fancy the prospect of the brief trip; I’d just be a reddish stain spread over a couple of hundred square feet of metal if one of the bearers slipped as the two big ships rolled together, but the nimble-footed seamen probably had the same thought in mind for themselves, for they made no mistake a minute later and both other stretchers had been brought across.

We were set down near the forward break of the afterdeck, beside our passengers and crew. In a group slightly to one side, with a guard all to themselves, stood a few officers and maybe a dozen men of the Ticonderoga’s crew. One of them, a tall, lean, angry-eyed man in his early fifties with the four gold rings of a captain on his sleeves and carrying a telegraph form in his hand, was talking to Mcllroy, our chief engineer, and Cummings. Mcllroy, ignoring the sudden lift of the guard’s gun, brought him across to where we’d been set down. “Thank God you all survived,” Mcllroy said quietly. “Last time I saw you three I wouldn’t have given a bent penny for any of your chances. This is Captain Brace of the Ticonderoga. Captain Brace, Captain Bullen, Chief Officer Carter.”

“Glad to make your acquaintance, sir,” Bullen whispered huskily. “But not in these damnable circumstances.” No question about it, the old man was on the way to recovery. “We’ll leave Mr. Carter out of it, Mr. Mcllroy. I intend to prefer charges against him for giving undue and unwarranted aid to that damned monster Carreras.” considering I’d saved his life by refusing to let doc Marston operate on him, I did think he might have shown a little more gratitude.

“Johnny Carter?” Mcllroy looked his open disbelief. “It’s impossible!”

“You’ll have your proof,” Bullen said grimly. He looked up at Captain Brace. “Knowing that you knew what cargo you were carrying, I should have expected you to make a run for it when intercepted, naval guns or no naval guns. But you didn’t, did you? You answered an SOS, isn’t that it? Distress rockets, claims that plates had been sprung in the hurricane, sinking, come and take us off? Right, captain?”

“I could have outrun or out manuvered him,” Brace said tightly. Then, in sudden curiosity, “How did you know that?”

“Because I heard our first mate here advising him that it was the best way to do it. Part of your answer already, eh, Mcllroy?” He looked at me without admiration, then back at Mcllroy. “Have a couple of men move me nearer that bulkhead. I don’t feel too comfortable here.”

I gave him an injured glance but it bounced right off him. His stretcher was shifted and I was left more or less alone in front of the group. I lay there for about three minutes, watching the cargo transfer. A crate a minute, and this despite the fact that the Manilla holding the after ends of the two vessels together snapped and had to be replaced. Ten minutes at the most and he should be all through.

A hand touched my shoulder and I looked round. Julius Beresford was squatting by my side.

“Never thought I’d see you again, Mr. Carter,” he said candidly. “How do you feel?”

“Better than I look,” I said untruthfully.

“And why left all alone here?” He asked curiously.

“This,” I explained, “is what is known as being sent to coventry. Captain Bullen is convinced that I gave unwarranted help or aid, or some such legal phrase, to Carreras. He’s not pleased with me.”

“Rubbish!” He snorted.

“He heard me doing it.” “Don’t care what he heard,” Beresford said flatly. “Whatever he heard, he didn’t hear what he thought he did. I make as many mistakes as the next man, maybe more than most, but I never make a mistake about men… Which reminds me, my boy, which reminds me. I can’t tell you how pleased I am — and how delighted. Hardly the time and place for it, but nevertheless my very heartiest congratulations. My wife feels exactly the same way about it, I assure you.”

It was taking me all my time to pay attention to him. One of the crates was swinging dangerously in its slings, and if one of those crates dropped, fell on the deck, and burst open to reveal its contents, I didn’t see that there was going to be much future for any of us. It wasn’t a thought I liked to dwell on; it would be better to turn my mind to something else, like concentrating on what Julius Beresford was saying.

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

“The job at my Scottish oil port.” He was half impatient, half smiling. “You know. Delighted that you are going to accept. But not half as delighted as we are about you and Susan. All her life she’s been pursued, as you can guess, by hordes of gold-digging dead beats, but I always told her that when the day came that she met a man who didn’t give a damn for her money, even though he was a hobo, I wouldn’t stand in her way. Well, she’s found him. And you’re no hobo.”

“The oil port? Susan and me?” I blinked at him. “Look, sir…”

“I might have known it, I might have known it!” The laugh was pretty close to a guffaw. “That’s my daughter. Never even got round to telling you yet. Wait till my wife hears this!”

“When did she tell you?” I asked politely. When I’d last seen her about two-fifteen that morning I would have thought it the last thing in her mind.

“Yesterday afternoon.” That was even before she had made the job proposal to me. “But she’ll get round to it, my boy, she’ll get round to it.”

“I won’t get round to it!” I didn’t know how long she had been standing there, but she was there now, a stormy voice to match stormy eyes. “I’ll never get round to it. I must have been mad. I’m ashamed of myself for even thinking. I heard him, daddy. I was there last night with the others in the sick bay when he was telling Carreras that the best way of stopping the Ticonderoga was a long piercing blast on a whistle brought the tale of Carter’s cowardice to a merciful end.”

Immediately green shirted armed men began to appear from other parts of the Ticonderoga, from the bridge and engine room where they’d been on guard during the transhipment, which was now finished except for one last crate. Two of the men with guns, I noticed, were dressed in blue merchant navy uniforms: those would be the radio officers Carreras had introduced aboard the Ticonderoga. I looked at my watch. Six twenty five. Carreras was cutting it fine enough.

And now Carreras himself had jumped across to the afterdeck of the Ticonderoga. He said something to Captain Brace. I couldn’t hear what it was, but I could see Brace, his face hard and grim, nodding reluctantly. Carreras arranging for the transfer of the coffins. On his way back to the rail he stopped beside me. “You see that Miguel Carreras keeps his words. Everybody safely transferred.” He glanced at his watch. “I still need a lieutenant.”

“Good-bye, Carreras.”

He nodded, turned on his heel and left as his men brought the coffins on to the afterdeck of the Ticonderoga. They handled them very reverently indeed, with a tender delicacy that showed they were only too aware of their contents. The coffins were not immediately recognisable as such: in the final gesture of the consummate actor paying the minutest attention to the last detail in his role, he had draped them with three stars and stripes. Knowing Carreras, I was pretty sure that he’d brought them all the way from the Caribbean.

Captain Brace stooped, lifted a corner of the flag on the coffin nearest to him, and looked down at the brass plaque with the name of Senator Hoskins on it. I heard a quick indrawing of breath, saw that Susan Beresford, hand to her parted lips, was staring down wide-eyed at it, too, remembered that she must be still under the impression that the twister was inside, reached out, and grabbed her ankle. I grabbed it hard.

“Be quiet!” I muttered fiercely. “For heaven’s sake shut up!”

She heard me. She kept quiet. Her old man heard me, but he kept quiet also, which must have taken quite a bit of doing on his part when he saw me with my hand round his daughter’s ankle. But the ability to keep expressions and emotions buttoned up must be among the most elementary training for an aspiring multimillionaire.

The last of Carreras’ men were gone, Carreras with them. He didn’t waste any time wishing us “Bon Voyage” or anything of the kind; he just ordered ropes cast off and disappeared at speed for the bridge. A minute later the Campari was under way and, her afterdeck haphazardly packed with crates, was slewing round and heading away towards the east.

“Well,” Bullen said into the heavy silence, “There he goes, the murderer. With my ship, damn his soul!”

“He won’t have it for long,” I said. “Not even half an hour. Captain Brace, I advise you…”

“We’ll dispense with your advice, mister.” Captain Bullen’s voice was a series of rattraps snapping shut, the blue eyes very frosty indeed.

“This is urgent, sir. It’s imperative that Captain Brace — "

“I gave you a direct order, Mr. Carter. You will obey…”

“Will you please be quiet, Captain Bullen?” Respectful exasperation, but more exasperation than respect.

“I still think you’d better be listening to him, sir,” The bo’sun put in, gravely unhappy. “Mr. Carter was not idle last right, unless I’m much mistaken.” “Thanks, bo’sun.” I turned to Captain Brace again. “Phone the officer of the watch. Due west 180 degrees from the Campari and full speed. No, emergency power. Now, Captain Brace.”

The urgency in my voice got through. For a person who had just lost one hundred and fifty million dollars in gold Brace reacted surprisingly quickly and well to the man who had just caused him to lose it. He gave a few quick words of instruction to a junior officer, then turned a coldly speculative gaze on me.

“Your reasons, sir?”

“In number four hold of the Campari Carreras is carrying an armed atomic bomb with the time fuse running out, the twister, the new missile stolen from the Americans a week or so ago.” A glance round the strained, incredulous faces of the listeners showed that they knew what I was talking about all right; it showed clearly that they couldn’t believe it.

“The twister “Atomic bomb?” Brace’s voice was harsh and too loud. “What damned rubbish…”

“Will you listen? Miss Beresford, am I telling the truth?”

“You’re telling the truth.” Her voice was unsteady, her green eyes jumpy and still on that coffin. “I saw it, captain. But…”

“So,” I said. “The bomb. Armed. Due to go off in” — I glanced at my watch — "less than twenty-five minutes. Carreras knows it’s due to go off then. That’s why he’s in such a tearing hurry to get away: he imagines the twister is aboard here. And that’s why I’m in such a tearing hurry to go in the opposite direction: I know it’s not.”

“But it is here,” said Susan violently. “It is, you know it is! That coffin! There!”

“You’re wrong, Miss Beresford.” The Ticonderoga was picking up speed now, the rumbling thrust of her propellor shaft vibrating through the deck plates. I wouldn’t have put it past Carreras to have had his glasses trained on our afterdeck as long as he possibly could, so I lay quietly where I was for the next ten or fifteen seconds while about forty pairs of frankly terrified eyes stared at the flag-shrouded coffins. Then the poop of the Ticonderoga had swung round to the east, the Campari was blocked from sight, and I was out of my blankets, ripping off the outside blankets and splints and fishing out the concealed screw driver before getting stiffly to my feet. The effect upon passengers and crew, who had believed implicitly that Chief Officer Carter had a compound fracture of the thigh, was startling, to say the least. But I had no time to consider effects. I hobbled to the nearest coffin and pulled the flag clear.

“Mr. Carter” — Captain Brace was by my side — "what on earth are you doing? Criminal though Carreras may be, he told me Senator Hoskins…”

“Ha.” I said. With the handle of the screw driver I rapped out three sharp double knocks on the lid of the coffin: three knocks came in reply. I glanced round the ever-closing ring of watchers; a cameraman should have been there, recording those expressions for posterity. “Remarkable recuperative powers, those American senators,” I said to Captain Brace. “You just can’t keep them down. You’ll see.”

I’d the lid off that coffin in two minutes flat: in coffin-lid removing, as in everything else, practice makes perfect.

Dr. Slingsby Caroline was as pale as any corpse I’d ever seen. He looked as if he had been frightened to death. I didn’t blame him: there must be lots of harrowing experiences calculated to drive a man round the bend, but I think being screwed down in a coffin for about five hours must beat the lot. Dr. Caroline wasn’t yet round the bend, but he’d been approaching it pretty fast, with the throttle wide open, by the time I got to him. He was shaking like a broken bedspring, his eyes wide with fear, and he could hardly speak; that knock of mine must have been the sweetest music he’d ever heard.

I left the ministrations to other hands and headed for the next coffin. The lid on this one was either pretty stiff or I was pretty weak, and I wasn’t making much progress when a burly seaman from the Ticonderoga’s crew took the driver from my hand. I wasn’t sorry to let it go. I looked at my watch. Seventeen minutes to seven.

“And this time, Mr. Carter?” It was Captain Brace once more at my elbow, a man whose expression clearly showed that his mind had given up trying to cope. It was understandable enough.

“Conventional explosive with a time setting. I think it’s meant to blow up the twister in sympathetic detonation if the twister’s own time mechanism doesn’t work. Frankly, I don’t know. The thing is that even this could sink the Ticonderoga.”

“Couldn’t we couldn’t we just heave it over the side?” He asked nervously.

“Not safe, sir. About due to go off and the jar of its hitting the water might be just enough to trigger off the clock. It would blow a hole the size of a barn through the side of your ship… You might get someone to unscrew the third lid too.”

I looked at my watch again. Fifteen minutes to seven. The Campari was already hardly more than a dark smudge far down on the lightening horizon to the east, six, perhaps seven miles away. A fair distance off, but not far enough.

The lid was clear of the second coffin. I pulled back the covering blankets, located the primer and the two slender leads to the inset detonator, and gingerly sliced through these, one at a time, with a knife. Just to be on the safe side, I threw detonator and primer over the side. Two minutes later I’d rendered the time bomb in the third coffin equally harmless. I looked round the afterdeck; if those people had any sense, the place should have been deserted by now. No one seemed to have stirred an inch.

“Mr. Carter,” Bullen said slowly. He’d stopped glaring at me. “I think perhaps you owe us a little explanation. This business of Dr. Caroline, the coffins, the — the substitutions.” So I gave it to him, highly condensed, while everybody crowded round, and at the end he said, “And I think maybe I might owe you a small apology.” Contrite, but not going overboard about it. “But I can’t get the thought of the twister out of my head — the twister and the Campari. She was a good ship, mister. Damn it, I know Carreras is a villain, a monster, a man surrounded by cutthroats. But did you have to do it this way? To condemn them all to death? Forty lives on your hands?”

“Better than a hundred and fifty lives on Carreras’ hands,” Julius Beresford said sombrely. “Which is what it would have been but for our friend here.”

“Couldn’t be done, sir,” I said to Bullen. “The twister was armed and locked in position. Carreras has the key. The only way to render that bomb safe would be to tell Carreras and let him unlock it. If we’d told him before he’d left here, sure, he’d have disarmed it, then he would have killed every man and woman on the Ticonderoga. You can bet what you like that the Generalissimo’s last instruction was: ‘No one must live to talk about this.’“

“It’s still not too late,” Bullen said insistently. He wasn’t giving a damn about Carreras, but he loved the Campari. “Once we’re under way there’s no chance of his being able to board us again and kill us, even assuming he comes after us. We can dodge whatever shells…”

“One moment, sir,” I interrupted. “How do we warn him?”

“By radio, man, by radio! There’s still six minutes. Get a message…”

“The Ticonderoga’s transmitters are useless,” I said wearily.

“They’re smashed beyond repair.”

“What?” Brace caught my arm. “What? Smashed? How do you know?”

“Use your head,” I said irritably. “Those two bogus wireless operators were under orders to wreck the transmitters before they left. Do you think Carreras wanted you sending out SOSs all over the Atlantic the moment he took off?”

“The thought hadn’t even occurred to me.” Brace shook his head and spoke to a young officer. “On the phone. You heard. Cheek.”

He checked and was back in thirty seconds, his face grave. “He’s right, sir. Completely smashed.”

“Our friend Carreras,” I murmured. “His own executioner.”

Two seconds later and five minutes ahead of schedule the Campari blew itself out of existence. She must have been at least thirteen miles away; she was well hull-down over the horizon, and the high square bulk of the Ticonderoga’s raised poop lay in our direct line of sight, but, for all that, the searing blue-white glare that was the heart of the exploding bomb struck at our cringing wounded eyes with all the strength of a dozen noonday suns while it momentarily highlight the Ticonderoga in blinding white and shadows blacker than night, as if some giant searchlight had been switched on only yards away. The intense whiteness, the murderous dazzlement, lasted no more than the fraction of a second though its imprint on the eye’s retina lasted many times longer and was replaced by a single bar-straight column of glowing red fire that streaked up into the dawn until it pierced the cloud above; and, following that, a great column of boiling seething-white water surged up slowly from the surface of the sea, incredibly slowly, seemed to reach halfway up to the clouds, then as slowly began to fall again. What little was left of the shattered and vaporised Campari would have been in that gigantic waterspout. The Campari and Carreras.

From birth to death that waterspout must have taken a full minute, and it was only seconds after it had vanished and the eastern horizon became clear again that the single flat thunderclap of sound followed by the deep, menacing rumble of the after-explosion and accompanying shock waves came at us over the surface of the sea. Then all was silence, profound and deathly.

“Well, Dr. Caroline,” I said conversationally, “at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that the damned thing works.”

He didn’t take me up on my conversational gambit. No one took me up on it. They were all waiting for the tidal wave, but no tidal wave came. After a minute or two a long, low, very fast-moving swell bore down on us from the east, passed under the Ticonderoga, made her pitch heavily perhaps half a dozen times, and then was gone. It was Captain Brace who was the first of all of them to find his voice.

“That’s it, then, Captain Bullen. All gone up in smoke. Your ship and my one hundred and fifty million dollars in gold.”

“Just the ship, Captain Brace,” I said. “Just the ship. As for the twenty vaporised generators, I’m sure the United States government will gladly recompense the Harms Worth and Holden Electrical Engineering Company.”

He smiled faintly; heaven knows he couldn’t have felt like smiling. “There were no generators in those crates, Mr. Carter. Gold bullion for Fort Knox. How that devil Carreras…”

“You knew there was gold in those crates?” I asked. “Of course I did. Rather, I knew we had it on board. But there had been a mistake in marking the crates. So much damned secrecy, I suppose, that one hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing. According to my manifest, the crates of gold were the forward twenty on the upper deck, but an admiralty message last night informed me of the mistake that had been made. Rather it informed those damned renegades of radio operators. Never showed it to me, of course. They must have radioed the news to Carreras, and the first thing they did when they tied up alongside was to give him the written message itself as confirmation. He gave it to me as a souvenir,” he added bitterly. He held out his hand with the form in it. “Want to see it?”

“No need.” I shook my head. “I can tell you word for word what’s in that cable. ‘highest priority urgent immediate repeat immediate attention master Fort Ticonderoga: grave error in loading manifest: special cargo not repeat not in forward twenty crates forward deck marked turbines Nashville Tennessee but repeat but in forward twenty crates afterdeck marked generators Oak Ridge Tennessee: indications you may be running into hurricane essential secure afterdeck cargo earliest: from the Office of the Minister of Transport by hand of Vice-Admiral Richard Hodson Director Naval Operations.’“

Captain Brace stared at me. “How in the name of…”

“Miguel Carreras also had a manifest in his cabin,” I said.

“Marked and correctly exactly the same as yours. I saw it. That radio message never came from London. It came from me. I sent it from the wireless office of the Campari at two o’clock this morning.”

It was a long silence indeed that followed; predictably enough, it was Susan Beresford who finally broke it. She moved across to Bullen’s stretcher, looked down at him, and said, “Captain Bullen, I think you and I both owe Mr. Carter a very great apology.”

“I think we do, miss Beresford. I think we do indeed.” He tried to scowl, but it didn’t quite come off. “But he told me to shut up, mind you. Me. His captain. You heard him?”

“That’s nothing,” she said in dismissal. “You’re only his captain. He told me to shut up, too, and I’m his fiancée. We’re getting married next month.”

“His fiancée? Getting getting married next month?” In spite of the pain Captain Bullen propped himself up on one elbow, stared uncomprehendingly at each one of us in turn, then lay back heavily on his stretcher. “Well, I’ll be damned! this is the first I’ve heard of this.”

“It’s the first Mr. Carter has heard of it, too,” she admitted. “But he’s hearing it now.”