The Saint in Miami

1

"If we get out of here," said the Saint, "I'll give you a lake of it. If we get out."

But he spoke so quickly that the line didn't waste an instant. He knew quite simply what that single shot meant, on their side and the other. But there was no use in arguing about it. It had saved everything and blown everything to hell, with one catastrophic explosion. And that was that.

"Get back behind those storehouses — everybody," he snapped. "Charlie, get moving."

He stooped, and in one flowing movement shoved the motorboat away, snatched up the sub-machine-gun that had tumbled out of the Greek's lifeless hands and raced after Karen and Hoppy towards the clump of small buildings at the end of the pier. He crouched there with them in partial shelter, and jerked his automatic out of its holster to give it to Karen Leith.

"You said you could use it," he reminded her. "Now show me. The fat's in the fire, but I think we can create a diversion while the boat gets clear."

From out in the anchorage came sounds of disorganised movement and some confused shouting. To the right of them, a door of the lodge was flung open, flinging a long strip of pallid illumination across the open shore; and Simon remembered the second lighted window which he had not waited to investigate after he had located Gilbeck and Justine. But only one man came plunging out, and then stopped uncertainly while he tried to orient himself to the disturbance.

He stayed in the beam of light from the doorway just one instant too long, Hoppy's Betsy snorted in its earsplitting bass, and the man's arms and legs seemed to whirl wide of his body like the limbs of a spun marionette before he fell to the ground. He kicked twice after he was down, and then he was quite still.

Mr Uniatz lowered the gun which he had been holding poised for a finishing shot.

"Chees, boss," he said disgustedly. "I ain't been gettin' enough practice. I t'ought I was gonna hafta waste anudder sinker on him."

Simon thought he saw a dim alteration in the silhouette of the submarine's conning tower, as if something might be emerging from it In any case, an extra shot would not be wasted if it kept the general attention centered in their direction and away from the water. He plugged a bullet somewhere in the right direction, and heard it ricochet whining into the night.

Nobody else had come out of the lodge, and it seemed a fair chance that there had been no one else in it.

"Spread out that way," he directed Hoppy. "They don't know what sort of a raid they're up against yet, and we may as well give them something to think about."

Mr Uniatz still lingered for a moment, nursing his cosmic grievance.

"I don't get it, boss," he complained. "If dis ain't de Pool, what de hell are dey beefin' about?"

"Maybe they were fond of Gallipolis," Simon told him. "You never can tell We'll talk about it some other time. Slide!"

"Okay."

Mr Uniatz edged away. His idea of stealth was rather like that of a prowling bison, but it was adequate for the circumstances. And at least it needed no more detailed instructions. The Hoppy Uniatz who struggled in leviathan agony with the coils and contortions of the Intellect, and the Hoppy Uniatz of the life of direct action and efficient homicide, were two men so different that it was hard to associate their responses with the same individual. But it was in such situations as this that Mr Uniatz came into his precarious kingdom. Simon tried to follow him with his eyes and ears, lost him for a while, and then felt a weird tingle as something like a deliriously gaudy snake reached into the wedge of light from the lodge doorway and drew back quickly with the gun that the dead man lying there had dropped clutched in its maw. It was a half instant before he realised that the jazzy colouration was due to the sleeve of the Seminole chief's shirt which Hoppy still proudly wore. Thus having augmented his armament, Mr Uniatz let off another shot which drew an answering shriek from somewhere out in the bay.

The babble of incoherent voices that came over the water was dying away as a new crisper and harsher voice began to dominate them with a rattle of commands.

"Friede," said the Saint inclemently, and felt the girl's left hand in the crook of his elbow.

"I only wish we could spot him," she said. Somehow there was nothing that jarred him in the coldblooded way she said it.

Abruptly, a searchlight on the upper deck of the March Hare sizzled into life, thrusting a white spear over the tree-tops below the lodge. It swung high and wild for a moment, and then dipped towards the waterfront and began to sweep towards them, cutting a blinding arc out of the bay.

Simon raised the machine-gun, settling his fingers on the grips; but before he had chosen his aim the gun that he had given Karen spat twice, shatteringly, across his right eardrum. At the second shot, the white blade of light shrank suddenly back into a small red eye that faded and went out A faint tinkle stole over the pool, belatedly, to confirm the visual evidence.

"At this range, darling," said the Saint respectfully, "I'll admit you've shown me."

"I used to be pretty good," she said.

Friede's voice began barking fresh orders, but it was too far for the guttural German to be distinguishable. However, dim figures could be seen moving on the March Hare's lighted decks, and Simon lifted the Tommy gun again.

"It won't do any harm to keep them busy," he remarked, and hosed a short burst along the length of the yacht.

As the clatter of the Tommy gun died away, and its echoes went dwindling across the startled Everglades, one or two hoarse yells floated back to suggest that the expenditure of precious ammunition might have shown another small profit. There were also four or five answering shots, aimed at the fiery flickering of the machine-gun's muzzle. They were born out of tiny sparks that blossomed on the yacht's deck, and spanged to extinction among the corrugated-iron shelters to left and right The darkness gave them a curious impersonality, making them seem as unfrightening as the first heavy drops of a thunder shower or a June bug banging against a lighted window.

Then all the lights on the March Hare went out as somebody pulled a master switch.

"I was afraid they'd think of that," Simon said conversationally.

He strained his eyes to penetrate the obscurity of the bay. The moon had risen higher, thinning the darkness of the sky; there was enough light for him to see the pale beauty of Karen Leith's face beside him, watching with the same intentness as his own. But over the water, against the sombre unevenness of the opposite river bank, the illumination was deceptive and full of shadows that seemed to take form from imagination and then disappear. Yet he could see nothing that looked like the motorboat in which he had sent off Charlie Halwuk and Justine and Lawrence Gilbeck. He had not kept track of the time, but it seemed as if they should have had almost enough leeway, with the current helping them, to steal far enough down river to be safe. Certainly he had heard none of the outcry or shooting that should have announced their discovery.

Karen was thinking the same thoughts.

She said: "Do you really think they can make it?"

"Once they get clear," said the Saint, "it's in the bag. I've done some travelling with that dried-up Seminole, and I can't think of any place I wouldn't back him to make in this country."

It seemed quite natural that there was nothing to say about themselves. They were there. Without a guide, the jungle at their backs held them as securely as a prison wall.

"I wish you could have done something about your friends," she said.

"They may get a chance to do something about themselves in the excitement," he said, and they both knew that they were just talking. "They're wonderful people for getting themselves out of trouble.

He was still listening. In a few more seconds, if nothing had gone wrong, it would be time to hear the motorboat engine starting its racket somewhere in the distance to the southwest. But it had not come yet. The jungle seemed to have fallen unearthly still, for the owl had departed to more peaceful glades, and not more than half the shocked insects had tentatively begun to resume their choir practice since the last burst of firing had stunned them to an abnormal silence.

Then there was a muffled grating of wood, and a splash far fainter than a leaping fish would have made; and Simon suddenly was aware that a vague shape that had been drifting shorewards on the murkily moonlit water was neither the product of an overstrained retina nor the floating stump of a tree. At the same instant Hoppy fired twice, and the crack of Karen's gun jumped in on the heels of those explosions. Simon took a fraction longer to bring up the Tommy gun, but the thundering stammer of death that poured from it made up in quantity for its tardiness. The response came in shouts and screams, and a single thin piercing wail that seemed as if it would never stop before it was smothered in a choking gurgle. The boat ceased to drift cross-stream and swung lazily round with the current, and something human plunged away from it with a loud splash and floundered wildly back towards the submarine. Karen's gun spoke once more, and the splashing stopped as if it had been cut off with a knife.

The Saint's teeth showed in the dark mask of his face.

"I wonder how the bastards like our blitzkrieg," he drawled.

"I like it, anyway," she said, and the cool tension of excitement was in her voice, with no land of fear. "Now I know what it must feel like to fight Hitler's invaders. You're only scared until the first shot is fired. And then you hate their guts so much that it doesn't matter what they can do, if you can only get some of them before they get you."

" 'They shall not pass'," he said crookedly. "I only wish we could make it stick. But there'll be more landing parties, and we haven't many more shots between us."

"I'm only glad," she said, "that we could be together like this — just once."

Their hands held, in an understanding that more words could only have made trivial.

Hoppy Uniatz fired three times more, at spaced intervals, but without any audible repercussion.

The new sound penetrated the Saint's ears — a faint pervasive hum that almost blended with the continuous buzzing of mosquitoes. He had barely time to recognise it as the carrier hum of a loud speaker before Heinrich Friede's magnified voice blared clearly across from the yacht

"If Mr Templar is there, will he please fire one shot?" Simon hesitated a moment. Then—

"What the hell?" he said grimly to Karen. "They must know it's my outfit. The police or the Coastguard wouldn't have opened fire without some sort of parley… But stand by to duck."

He fired one shot, trying to aim it at the voice, and then flung the girl aside and dropped fiat beside her behind the flimsy cover of the nearest storehouse. But the hail of machine-gun fire which he had half expected to cut loose in reply did not come.

"Thank you," said the voice. "Now I think you have done enough damage. Another party has already landed higher up the river, and you will certainly be captured in a short time, but I should prefer not to lose any more men. Therefore unless you surrender at once we shall start working on Miss Holm and Mr Quentin, quite slowly and scientifically, so that their cries can be broadcast to you. If you wish to avoid this, you can signify your surrender by firing two shots close together."

Then Patricia Holm's voice came clearly through, without a faltering syllable, so that he could almost see the brave set of her chin and the undaunted steadiness of her eyes.

"Hullo, Simon, boy… Don't listen to the big ape. He's only saying that because he knows he can't catch you."

"Tell him to go to hell," Peter put in.

But a single sharp cry overtook the last word, and was instantly stifled.

"I shall give you ten seconds to decide, Mr Templar," said Captain Friede.

Simon bowed his head over the sub-machine-gun, and his hands were clenched on the grips as if he could have torn the weapon apart like a stick of putty.

Karen Leith gazed at his face of frozen granite.

Then she pointed her gun to the stars and pulled the trigger twice, quickly.

As if in answer, far to the west, a motorboat engine awoke to spluttering life.

2

The square bulk of Mr Uniatz lumbered uncertainly out of murk.

"Boss," he said blankly, "was dat you? Dijja mean we say Uncle to dem Heinies?"

"No, Hoppy," said the girl. "I did it."

The Saint looked at her strangely.

"At least," he said, "I shouldn't have expected you to help me break down."

Her hands slipped over his, and her lovely face held the ghost of a smile of great understanding.

She said: "My dear, they could have taken us. In the end. You know it as well as I do. Why should anyone suffer for nothing? Probably we shall still all be killed, but it may be quick. And we've done all that we hoped to do. Our messengers got away. Listen."

He listened, steeping his spirit in the methodical chugging of the motorboat far off in the dark, before it was drowned out by the more steady thrum of a speed tender putting out from the March Hare — knowing that she had only spoken the truth, and glad of it, but still trying to reconcile himself to the paradox of defeat in victory. And he wondered if that might only be because his own personal pride had not yet been subdued, so that his insignificant individual fate must still obtrude on a cataclysmic background in which millions of individuals no less important to themselves would yet be consumed like ants in a furnace.

And through that, after seconds that might have run into centuries, he came back to a sanity as immeasurable and enduring as the stars.

Everything else went on. But there was a difference. A difference beyond which nothing could be changed. And yet the only way he could show it was in the recapture of the old careless mockery which had always gone ahead of him like a banner. Because other rebels and outlaws like him would still come after him, and the great game would still go on, as long as the spark of freedom was born into the souls of men.

"Of course," he said. "And they still haven't killed us yet They could have their hands full even after they've got us.

The speedboat was creaming in towards the dock.

"Ya mean, boss," said Mr Uniatz dumbly. "I can't do no more practice on dese mugs?"

"Not just now, Hoppy. We've got to get Patricia and Peter back with us first. After that we may be able to do something."

And if he thought that the chance was very slight, the doubt could never have been heard in his voice.

He threw the Tommy gun on the ground away from him, and with a similar gesture the girl tossed her automatic after it. More slowly, perplexed but still reluctantly obedient, Hoppy Uniatz followed suit. They stood in a silent group, watching the tender slacken in towards the pier landing.

Simon took out his cigarette-case and offered it to Karen, as easily as if they had been standing in the foyer of a New York night club waiting for a table, while men leaped out of the speedboat, ran down the pier, and fanned out at the double into a wide semicircle with the efficient precision of trained storm troops — which, he reflected ironically, was what they probably were. But without giving them a glance he struck a match and held it for Karen. Their eyes met over the flame in complete understanding.

"We did have fun, anyway," he remarked.

"We did." Her voice was as steady as his; and he never wanted to forget the unchanged loveliness of her proud pale face, and the cool violet of her eyes, and the tousled flame of her hair. "And thanks for everything — Saint."

He touched the match to his own cigarette and flipped it away; but the light still dwelt on them. It came from the converging beams of three flashlights in the ring that was closing in on them.

Simon looked round the circle. Some of the men were in German naval uniforms, others, in ordinary seaman's dungarees, but they all had the square dry-featured brutalised faces which Nazi ethnology had set up as the ideal of Nordic superiority. They were armed with revolvers and carbines.

Another man ran around the outside of the group, beyond range of the lights, and said:

The second voice was Friede's. He strode through into the light. His heavy-jawed face was hard and arrogant, the flat-lipped mouth clamped in an implacable line that turned down slightly at the corners. His stony eyes swept quickly and unfeelingly over his three captives, ending with the Saint.

"Mr Templar, this is not all your party."

"You may have noticed a guy on the dock with his head blown open," said the Saint helpfully. "He was liquidated quite early in the proceedings. In fact, we did that ourselves. He didn't seem to be able to make up his mind which side to be on, so we put him into permanent neutrality."

"I mean the Gilbecks. Where are they?"

"How are your ears?"

The captain did not move his head. But through the stillness everyone could hear the monotonous putter of the motorboat engine far out in the sweltering night.

Friede's pebbly stare pored over the Saint from under lowering lids for long crawling seconds.

Then he turned and rasped fresh orders at his men. Carbines prodded the Saint, driving him with Karen and Hoppy towards the barred lodge room from which he had released Gilbeck and Justine. Somebody went in ahead and turned on the light again as they were herded in. Outside, there was an exclamation and some throaty muttering as the dead body of the guard was discovered, cut short by another of the captain's wolfish commands. The storm troopers who had followed into the prison room cleared the doorway for Friede to march through. He stood back, but the lane stayed open.

After a very brief pause of intense silence, Patricia and Peter were hustled through, to be pushed over with Simon and Karen and Hoppy into the back centre of the room.

Peter said casually: "Hullo, Chief. It's a funny thing. I've never been able to make out where you collect such an ugly-looking bunch of boils to play with."

Patricia Holm went straight to the Saint. He kissed her quickly, and his left arm still lay along her shoulders as he turned back to smile genially at Captain Friede.

"Well, Heinrich, dear carbuncle," he murmured, "this makes a very cosy little get-together. Now what shall we do to amuse ourselves? If we only had some old treaties we could cut paper dolls. Or there's nearly enough of us to form a glee club and sing the pig trough or Horse Vessel song."

But one more man still had to arrive to make the get-together truly complete, and he came last through the doorway as two of the seamen moved back to close it.

Randolph March's weakly handsome face was a little drawn with strain, and his fair hair was pushed just a lock or two out of its usual clean smooth grooming. In the same way, his soft white collar was just a little crumpled at the neck. The symptoms were insignificant in themselves, and yet taken together with the equally unexaggerated wildness of his eyes they made a definite picture of a man whose nerves were falling infinitesimally short of the standard of discipline that circumstances were demanding of them.

"The Gilbecks," he said to Friede; and his voice was roughened to just the same slight but revealing extent. "If they got away in the motorboat—"

"I know," said the captain.

"Why don't you send someone after them?"

"Who?"

"Well, you've got plenty of men, haven't you? There are two speedboats—"

"And no pilots. No one here could find his way very far outside of our own channel. You know what these creeks are like. We chose this place for that reason."

"Then they're bound to get stuck themselves, and we can catch them."

"I'm afraid," said the captain, "it may not be so easy. Our friend Templar and his party got here. They must have been guided. Unless Miss Leith…"

Both the men looked at Karen; and as if the full force of things that had been temporarily eclipsed by more immediate alarums rushed back on him as he studied her, Randolph March took a half step towards her with his mouth growing tight and ugly.

"You treacherous little bitch!"

"One moment." The captain's intervention had no hint of chivalry — it was plainly and practically dictated by nothing but cold-rolled efficiency. Recriminations were a waste of time; therefore he had no time for them. "Let Miss Leith tell us."

Karen gazed at him with calm contempt.

"It's always so nice to deal with gentlemen," she said satirically. "You wouldn't be rude, would you? You'd just fetch some hot irons and get on with it… Well, as far as this goes I can save you the trouble. I didn't bring them here. We met accidentally, on the way. And they had a very good guide of their own."

"Who was it?"

"An Indian."

Simon Templar flicked ashes peacefully on the floor.

"Let me help," he suggested affably. "After all, there should be no more secrets between any of us. To be exact, he was a bird from the Seminole Escort Bureau, by the name of Charlie Halwuk. A great hunter, I'm told, and certainly a wonderful pathfinder. After the way he brought us here, I'd back him against any homing pigeons you can trot out. So we sent him off with the Gilbecks. He seemed quite sure he could leave anybody who chased him high and dry on a sandbank for the mosquitoes and crocodiles to finish; but of course I don't want to stop you trying."

Friede stared at him for a second longer, and then turned back to Karen. The mask that he had worn in the first meeting on the March Hare had been dropped like an old coat. No one could have had any doubt now as to who was in command. Randolph March, gnawing his moustache by the doorway, had become a relative nonentity pillared by his captain's emotionless authority.

"Miss Leith, why were you trying to run away from here?"

"I got bored with the company."

"Perhaps," said Friede, "you were not taking yourself seriously enough in the observation you made just now."

The girl regarded him with unwavering eyes, and her red lips curled.

"I just don't want you to think you frighten me," she said. "As it happens, that's another thing I'll be glad to tell you. I was on my way out to tell the world about this submarine base of yours, and how it hooks up with Randy's Foreign Investment Pool."

"You are an inquisitive journalist, an ally of Templar, a blackmailing adventuress, or an agent of the Department of Justice?"

"Guess once more."

"You are some kind of Government agent."

"That's right," she said calmly. "And I mean the British Government."

There was a great silence in the room.

Captain Friede's face did not change. It was like a mould of hard-baked clay, without feeling or flexibility, behind which cogs and connections turned with the insentient functionality of an adding machine. Only in the drooping of the heavy lids over his obsidian eyes was there a sign of the reflex of personal viciousness.

Then he swung back to March.

"Go back to the yacht and get on the radio telephone to Miami," he ordered, and his tone had lost the last pretence of deference. "Call Nachlohr and tell him to get the emergency squad together. The motorboat will take at least three hours to get to Everglades — there is no other place they could head for. The emergency squad can drive across in about two hours, once they are collected. Tell Nachlohr to take all necessary measures. Gilbeck must not reach a telephone, at any cost."

The Saint stopped breathing.

It was the weak point in everything he had built on, the vital flaw in the one hope for which he had sacrificed all of them there.

Perhaps his brain had never worked so fast. The pressure of it made his head reel; and yet somehow he knew, almost without being able to believe it, that he held the faintest betrayal of dismay out of his face. In fact, he even forced another shade of carefree impudence into his taunting smile.

"It's a lovely idea, Randy," he said encouragingly, "and it'll certainly make everything much more exciting. Jesse Rogers and I were just talking along those lines in the Palmleaf Fan last night — you remember that conference, you arranged for us. On account of your suspicions about him were perfectly right; only they should have gone further. He really is an agent of the FBI, and it seems he'd found out even more about your local Bund than you suspected. In fact, he had a complete membership list, and the boys who weren't pinched last night are just being closely watched to see who else will get in touch with them. The guy listening on the wire will get a big lack out of it when you talk to Nachlohr — that is, if Comrade Nachlohr is still in a place where he can receive telephone calls."

The Saint took another pull at his cigarette, and his smile became even more demoralising as he drew reckless strength from the reactions that their faces were less quick to conceal than his.

"And there's one other thing you may have forgotten," he went on, in the same blithe and bantering voice. "You remember the letter I told you about that Gilbeck had written? Well, when I finally found out where this base was, I brought it up to date with some postscripts of my own before we started off on this trip and mailed it off to Washington in case of accidents. I'll admit I hoped to be able to rescue all the hostages before the big guns went off. But in a few hours they'll be going off just the same… So what with one thing and another, Heinrich, old Drekwurst, it looks as if you're going to have to make a lot of good excuses to your Fuhrer."

3

It worked.

It had to. The bluff was flawlessly played, as few living men but Simon Templar could have played it; but that only gave it a little extra certainty. The barest essential minimum of confidence would have served almost as well. For its real magnificence was in the basic conception.

It was unanswerable. Friede and March might suspect that an indefinite amount of it was bluff — although Simon had said it in a way that would have left only the most optimistic opposition any grounds for pinning much faith to that idea. They might have some evanescent motes of doubt. But doubt was the only thing that fundamentally had to be achieved. Doubt would work just as effectively both ways. For the stakes were too high to let Friede and March take the gamble. They couldn't even dare to waste precious time on an inspirational chance which if it failed would leave them worse off than before.

Simon read all these things in their faces, and knew the lift of a forlorn triumph which made every sacrifice worth while.

Friede stared at him with those vengefully hooded eyes.

"You sent that information to Washington?"

"By air mail," Simon confirmed, and only wished he had had enough foresight to make it true. "They've probably got it by now, and I expect the Navy and the Coastguard and the Marines will be on their way before morning."

Randolph March loosened his collar.

"They don't have to find anything," he said. "We can — can kill all these people and sink them in the swamp. Nobody could find them. Then we all say that Gilbeck must have gone off his head, and everybody knows the Saint's reputation — if we send the submarine out to sea—"

"You sickly fool!" Friede turned on him with impersonal savagery. "What about the Indian? And how do you think you can discredit Gilbeck as easily as that? What about the stores and other things here that a naval expert would recognise?"

"We could sink them in the river—"

"Without leaving any traces — in the time we've got? And wouldn't the investigators think of that? It would only take one diver to find them."

"Then what can we do?"

Friede stood with the immobility of a carving in Saxon stone, yet in his stillness he epitomised all the qualities that had been developed and glorified in the system which he represented — the crude driving force and brutality of the Vandals who had left their tribal name to posterity as a synonym for the destroying barbarian, fatefully combined with an infinitude of patient and painstaking and pitiless cunning that the Mongol invaders had left Eastern Europe for a legacy that was to filter westwards and lend its aid to the creation of a greater shambles than Genghis Khan ever aspired to. There was no mistaking the power and competence of the man: the only mystery was the strange contagious warp which had taken those abilities and bent them irrevocably to the service of death and desolation.

"We have to leave here," he said at last; and his voice was bluntly commonplace and precise, considering nothing but the immediate tactical problem. "Another base can be found for the submarine, probably; but in any case it must not be captured at all costs… I'm afraid you will have to lose the March Hare."

"Must I?" March sounded like a pouting child.

"The choice is yours. But you cannot stay here. On the other hand, if you try to escape in the March Hare, the Coastguard seaplanes will find it without much trouble. The submarine has at least a good chance of escape. I think you would do much better to come with us. There will be other work for you, and you can be sure that the Fatherland will not forget you."

The guard of seamen stood stiffly around the room like soldiers on parade, like robots, without initiative or feeling of their own. It gave Simon an eerie sensation to watch them. They would live or die, kill or be killed, as they were commanded, and all the time think only along one narrow track of blind mechanical obedience. They were a deadlier army than Karel Capek ever dreamed of in his fantasy of the revolt of the robots. And the Saint had a frightening prescience of the holocaust that must lay waste the earth before free and sentient men could triumph over those swarming legions from whom everything human had been stolen but their bodies and their ability to carry out commands. They were the new zombies, the living dead who existed only to interpret the ambitions of a neurotic autocrat more sinister than Nero…

Friede snapped an order at one of them to fetch some rope, and the man saluted and hurried to the door. Before he could get out he had to halt, salute again, and make way for a young man who had arrived at the entrance at the same moment.

The young man wore only a white undershirt and a pair of soiled cotton trousers, but his cap was worked with an officer's gold thread. He had very blond hair and a callous high-cheekboned face, and his blue eyes had the inner unseeing brightness of a fanatic. He held a revolver in one hand. He looked at Friede and raised his other hand and said: "Heil Hitler."

"Heil Hitler," responded Friede almost perfunctorily and went on in clipped methodical German. "Lieutenant, it has become necessary to remove the submarine immediately. You will prepare to sail at once. Take on all the fuel you can carry, also all the spare food supplies from the March Hare. You will also take as much as possible of the reserve ammunition and torpedoes from the stores on shore here. You will be ready in not more than two hours. I shall be going with you myself, and I shall give you your destination later. That is all."

"Jawohl, Herr Kapitan."

The lieutenant raised his hand again, turned on his heel and went out. His young hard voice began rattling its own orders outside.

A moment later the seaman returned with a full coil of rope. Friede jerked his hand curtly at the five prisoners.

"Search them and tie them up. Use another rope to tie them to the beds. And be sure that both jobs are well done."

Randolph March lighted a cigarette with hands that were not quite perfectly steady. Then he put the hands in his pockets and gazed about the room, trying not to pay too much attention to what was going on, and taking especial care not to directly meet the eyes of any of the captives. It was a different approach from that of Friede, who followed every move with implacable if unmoving vigilance. But in his own way March was trying to ape the captain's cold-blooded self-possession, although the faint shine of moisture on his forehead and the almost imperceptible whitish lines around his mouth worked against him.

"What are you going to do with them?" he asked.

"Leave them here," replied Friede, without taking his eyes from what the seaman was doing, and in a tone that somehow seemed to leave the trend of the sentence unfinished.

March puffed his cigarette jerkily.

"Why don't we take the girls?"

"What for?"

"Er — hostages. We might still be followed. But even the Navy might hesitate to attack us if they knew we'd got them on board."

"It might also help to relieve your own boredom," said the captain cynically.

March swallowed.

Friede switched a glance to him for just long enough to sum him up like a butcher inspecting a sample of steer beef on the hoof, and said: "It might be possible if you were prepared to share your relief with the rest of the crew. But even then it might give just as much trouble as relief. Apart from jealousies, seamen are superstitious. A wise commander humours them. This isn't a time to risk troubles that we can eliminate."

He might have been devoting excessively laborious precautions to planning a picnic.

March paced his corner of the room in short zigzags to which he tried to give the same air of casualness.

"The Foreign Investment Pool will be blown up," he said.

"Yes."

"That means — that means almost everything I had."

"Unfortunately."

"Then — then I'm not going to have very much left."

"My friend," said the captain, with terrifying simplicity, "have you stopped to consider how you would be able to reach any of your resources after Gilbeck's confession has reinforced Templar's report to Washington?"

Randolph March came to a halt in his pacing. It was as if the full meaning of the place where he had arrived was dawning on him at that time. His face was suddenly old and ugly, and his eyes emptied as though they were taking in a vista of the years that were left to him.

Simon saw him without pity, even with an arctic and eternal satisfaction. For what March had been and for what he had done there could be no excuse that could stand up to judgment, for what he suffered on account of it there could be no sympathy that was not maudlin; and in a world where civilisation was fighting for its very life there was no room for such inanities. It was that kind of vacuous sentimentality which had allowed the powers of the jungle to grow strong — that perverse broadmindedness which insisted on acknowledging every argument for the other side while discounting all the irrefutable evidence on its own side, which strained every nerve to make excuses for a murderer while it pigeonholed the sufferings of the victims who did not need any excuse. It was against such injustices masquerading under the name of Justice that the Saint had always waged his relentless battle; and now at this time he was glad that Randolph March had to suffer even a fraction of what had been suffered by the men and women and children who had been crushed under the juggernaut to which he had freely given his aid.

And besides that, the Saint had something else to think about.

It was no more than a faint flickering star far down on a dark horizon; but it was by such flickers that he had cheated death many times before, and once again that one star had not gone out.

For once again, so ridiculously that it seemed like part of an interminable routine, and yet just as logically as it had ever happened in any case before, he still had his knife. The search that had been made would not have left any of them any hidden weapons of the expected kind; and yet once again it had failed to discover the slim sheath strapped to his left forearm. And it was still possible, in spite of the knots that had been ruthlessly tightened in the stiff new rope, that the long fingertips of his right hand might be able to reach the hilt of that keen blade. Perhaps…

Simon held on to that attenuated hope. And at the same time yet another thing was obtruding itself on his consciousness.

It was a peculiar acrid smell that was starting to creep into the room. It had a sharpness that was quite distinctive, that fretted his nostrils in a perplexed effort of recognition as the atmosphere grew heavier with it.

"It isn't quite so much fun as you thought it was going to be, is it, Randy, old boy?" he was saying. "It's worrying about all sorts of things like that that gave Heinrich his bald dome. You'd better take some March Hair Tonic along with you if you want to save your own crop."

March glanced at him almost vacantly, and took another deep hot pull at his cigarette.

And all at once Simon knew the meaning of that curious pungent odour in the air. One sentence out of Peter Quentin's first report on Randolph March drummed through his head in a monotonous rhythm. His eyes stayed fixed on the burning cigarette with a kind of weird fascination.

"But — that can't be right." March turned back to Friede, and it seemed that his voice was harsher and high pitched. "I can't lose everything. Everything! What am I going to live on? Where can I go?"

"You can be sure that the Party will take care of you," Friede said dispassionately. "I can't tell you yet where we shall be going. I shall communicate with Berlin after the submarine is at sea. But you would be wise not to make too much of your own personal losses. Please remember that Templar's interference has cost the Reich a much greater setback in organisation and preparation than the loss of your private fortune. In this service, as you should know, the individual is of no importance. I hope you agree with me."

"I hope you do, too, Randy," said the Saint; and now his mockery had a finer edge, a crystallising direction that was founded on that acrid-smelling cigarette. "It's a bit different isn't it? You had a lot of fun being a plutocrat of the Fifth Column, while you could enjoy your mansions and yachts and aeroplanes, and plan your sabotage and propaganda over nice cold bottles of champagne with a glamour girl at each elbow. Now I hope you're going to enjoy doing a lot more hard work on beer and ersatz cheese, while a lot of big shots like Heinrich crack the whip. It will be a very refining experience for you, I think."

March gulped, a little dazedly, as the Saint's insinuatingly derisive voice drove each of its points home with the leisured aim of a skilled surgeon operating a probe, and the drawn lines around his mouth whitened and twitched a little more. Captain Friede saw and heard the cause and effect also. His eyes had narrowed on March while Simon spoke, and it was significant that he had not tried to make the Saint stop talking. He had gone back into a reptilian stillness from which he roused again with the same reptilian speed.

Simon saw the flare of his small nostrils that was the only warning. And then the captain had taken three quick steps across to March, snatched the cigarette from his mouth and thrown it on the floor, and stamped his heel on it. "Dummkopf!" he snarled. "This is no time for that!" But he had moved too late. March had already sucked enough marijuana into his lungs to make a maneater out of a mouse. His eyes sparkled with a wide hollow brilliance. "Damn you—"

His voice cracked, but not his muscular coordination. Like lightning he whirled and snatched a carbine from the slack hands of the nearest unsuspecting guard. He fanned the barrel across the captain's chest.

"It's not going to happen like that, do you see?" The words ran together in shrill desperation. "I won't let it! I'm going to fool all of you. I'm going to keep you here. I'll turn you over to the Navy myself. When they get here I'll say you tried to fool me, but I was too smart for you. I captured you all myself. They won't take anything away from me. I'll be a hero—"

Simon's heart sank again.

It was like watching a slow-motion nightmare, in which horror advanced with infinite sluggishness and yet was preceded by a paralysis which prohibited doing anything about it. March was crazy, of course — his threat could only have been uttered by a man at a hop-headed height of hysteria that could eliminate cold facts by forgetting them. But that same madness, combined with the strange dislocation of the senses of time and space that was a unique property of the drug, also destroyed itself.

March might have thought that he could cover anyone in the room in a split second; but he was wrong. Friede only nodded, slightly unhurriedly, to another guard who was halfway behind March. A revolver shocked the room twice with its expanding thunder…

Simon's frosted blue eyes settled again on Captain Friede as the Nazi looked up from a body that finished jerking a mere instant after it sprawled over the floor.

"I hate to admit it, Heinrich," he said, "but I couldn't have thought of a more poetic end for him myself."

"He was not the first fool we have had with us," Friede said with complete coldness. "And he will not be the last. But as long as we can find pawns like him we shall not be afraid of many puny efforts like yours."

"It must be wonderful to feel so certain about everything," said the Saint with a coldness that had no fundamental difference, even though it had far less reason.

The captain walked calmly round the room, testing the bonds of Hoppy Uniatz, Karen Leith, Peter Quentin, Patricia Holm, and lastly — with especial care — the Saint.

Then he hit the Saint six times across the face, with icy calculation.

"That," he said, "is for some of your humorous remarks. I only wish it was practical for us to take you to Germany, where the discipline of a concentration camp would do much more for your education. But as it is, you will be removed from the need for discipline… I hope Gilbeck did not omit to tell you that there are a hundred pounds of high explosive under the flooring of this room, with a detonating device which I can fire by radio from the submarine. As soon as we are sufficiently far away, I shall permit myself the luxury of pressing the button… I leave you and your friends to look forward to that moment"

4

It was dark in the room before their eyes could adapt themselves to see by the drift of moonlight that filtered through the small window. Friede had switched off the light when he went out, with a deliberation which told as plainly as words that he did it for a last finishing touch of sadism, to eke the ultimate ounce of mental torment out of their wait for death by stealing the small comfort of companionship that light might have given them. March's body had been left ignored where it had fallen. The storm troopers had been withdrawn, all of them to help hasten the readying of the submarine, except one man who had been posted outside the door. They could hear him pacing up and down like a sentry.

They had not been gagged; and Simon did not believe that that was any oversight. It belonged with the same psychology as the putting out of the light. Light could have aided courage; voices alone, speaking in darkness, might be more likely to give way, and in so doing snowball the self-made agony of nerves wrung out under intolerable stain. That was how Friede would have seen it. But Patricia Holm broke the silence first, in a voice that held only practical anxiety.

"Simon, boy, are you all right?"

"As fit as a flea, darling," he said. "I don't think Heinrich tried to do too much serious damage, because if he'd really knocked me out I might have missed a lot of these two hours of interesting thinking that he was so pleased about giving us."

And even while he spoke he was working, the muscles of his arms and shoulders cording in the titanic effort to stretch a few millimetres of slack out of the ropes on his wrists, so that his fingertips might grip the hilt of his knife and ease it out of its sheath. .

In the darkness there were sounds of other efforts, and the quick subdued catching and releasing of laboured breath.

"I just wish," Peter Quentin said strainingly, "you'd had the sense to mind your own fool business and let us mind ours. If we want to come to a place like this to get away from you, isn't that enough to tell you we don't want you? Anyone might think you were a detective snooping for evidence for a divorce."

"It was the deputy sheriffs that worried me," said the Saint. "If I'd known that you and Pat were just looking for some jungle love I'd have gone back to the Palmleaf Fan. I was just afraid they might have picked you up because they'd found out she was under sixteen."

"Make it under nine," said Patricia. "You should have left us here just for being taken in by an old chestnut like that."

"It was just as good a chestnut as it always has been," said the Saint. "In fact, it was better than usual in this case. The Sheriff had already paid us a call earlier in the day, and you had every reason to believe that I might have raised some more hell at the Palmleaf Fan. Which as a matter of fact was what did happen, to some extent."

"Tell us," said Patricia.

The Saint told them, while he writhed and fought and rested and fought again. It was worth telling, to pass the time, and it kept all their minds away from other things. But in spite of what he was doing, his voice never lost its concise and self-contained inflection. He might have been telling a story that there was all the time in the world to discuss.

By the time he had finished they knew everything that he knew himself. The picture was complete. And there was silence again…

"A sweet set-up," Peter commented at length. "I just wish I could have had your pal Heinrich to myself for a few minutes."

It seemed like the only thing to say. But Hoppy Uniatz had other ideas.

"Boss," he said heavily, "I still don't get it."

"Get what?" Simon asked, very kindly.

"About de Pool."

"Hoppy, I tried to tell you—"

"I know, boss. Dis here ain't de Pool, at all. But you hear what March says before dey give him de woiks? He says after we come here de Pool is all blown up. We ain't never blown up nut'n. So dey must be some udder hijackers tryin' to muscle in on dis shine. I don't get it," said Mr Uniatz, reiterating his major premise.

It's just a general craze for blowing things up," Simon explained. "It'll die out after a while, like miniature golf and the Handies."

There was another lull. There should have been so much to say at a time like that, and yet at that time there seemed to be so tittle that was worth saying.

Outside, above the slow pacing of the sentry, the heavier tramping back and forth of laden men went on, with the sounds of creaking tackle and clunking wood, of muttering voices and the intermittent sharp spur of commands.

Karen Leith said reflectively: "I don't know how the rest of you are getting on, but I'm supposed to have been trained in all the tricks of getting out of ropes, and I'm afraid these knots are too good for me."

"For me too," said Peter.

Even the Saint seemed to have stopped struggling.

Patricia said in a sudden eerie whisper: "What's moving around in here?"

"Shut up," said the Saint's low voice. "Just keep on talking as you have been."

And the sound came from a different part of the room from where he had last spoken. In the dim moonlight their straining eyes watched a shadow move — a shadow that crept here and there on the floor. But it was not Randolph March come to life again, as the first ghostly brush of horror in their flesh had suggested, for his shape could still be seen lying where it had fallen.

They were tongue-tied for a while, trying to frame sentences that would sound natural.

At last Peter said, with purpose: "If only Hoppy and I were loose we could jump the guy at the door and get his gun and kill some more of the swine before they got us."

"But they would get you, Peter." Again the Saint's voice came from another place. "There are plenty of them, and one gun-load wouldn't go very far."

"If we were loose," said Patricia, taking her tone from Peter, "we could sneak off and hide in the jungle. They couldn't afford to spend much time hunting for us."

"But they'd still get away," said the Saint.

"Maybe dey wouldn't have room for all de liquor," said Mr Uniatz, developing his own fairy-tale. "Maybe dey gotta leave a whole case, so we can find it."

"If I could get out," Karen said, "I'd do anything to try and stop the submarine."

With what?" Peter demanded.

"I wish I knew."

There was a tiny snapping sound, a very thin long-drawn squeak, then a slurred rustle.

Peter made a restive movement

"I know it's all quite stupid," he remarked, "but I wish you'd give us some of your ideas, Skipper. Just to pass the time. What would you do if you could do anything?"

There was no answer.

The silence dragged through long tingling seconds.

Patricia said softly, and not quite steadily: "Simon…"

The Saint did not answer. Or was it an answer when two spaced finger-taps beat almost inaudibly on the floor?.

There was nothing else. They had lost track of the moving shadow, although there might have been a new angular patch of blackness in one dark comer near where the shadow had last moved. But the square of luminance from the window had spread itself on the floor in a way that built up deceptive outlines. In the straining of their eyes, all shadows seemed to run together and dissolve like ephemeral fluids. Each of them at some time tried to count other shapes that could be dimly distinguished and identified. One, two, three — and the counter… and begin again.

But it was quiet. The ears could create sound in protest, as the eyes could create form and movement. The magnified sifflation of a breath, the screak of a cot-spring, the pulse of their own blood-stream — anything could be built into what the mind wanted to make of it. It even seemed to Karen once that something moved underneath her, like a snake slithering under the floor, so that her skin tightened with instinctive fear.

Presently Peter spoke.

"At a time like this," he said loudly, "the Saint would begin to tell one of his interminable stories about a bow-legged bed-bug named Aristophagus, who would find himself in a number of complicated and quite unprintable dilemmas. Not having Simon's virginal mind, I can't really reputise for him. So let's play some other silly game. We all try to give the name of a song with our names in it. Like if your name was Mary, you'd say Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary. Or Hoppy could say Hopping This Find You As It Leaves Me, In Love."

There was another inevitable lull.

"Pat Up four Troubles In your Old Kit Bag" said Patricia.

"You started it, Peter," Karen observed. "Where are you?"

"Peter Me Of Love," said Mr Quentin engagingly.

"Karen Me Back To Old Virginny," she answered.

"This is getting worse and worse," said Patricia. "When do we get down to Holm Sweet Holm?"

It was something fantastic to remember and yet coldly dreadful to go through. Somehow, with feverish desperation they kept their voices going. They worked through every name that they all knew, and gravitated from there into emptier and wilder devices. And the time crawled by.

The square patch of moonlight moved across the floor and slid gruesomely over part of the inanimate face of Randolph March. The sentry shuffled endlessly back and forth outside. The speed tender had made three or four droning trips across the bay. The laboured tramping to and fro of the men shifting stores had dwindled; the underplay of their voices had died to rare guttural murmurs, and the barking of commands had become more infrequent. New sounds had also entered the audible background — clankings of metal distorted by the echoes of water, voices muffled by distance and mingled with vague scrapings and splashings. For a while there had been a humming noise that had stopped again.

They had no way to keep track of the minutes that had passed. But each one of them knew how their little span of life had been going by. And not one of them had yet uttered any speculation about the one voice that none of them had heard for so long.

Karen Leith said at last almost in a sigh: "They must be nearly ready to sail by now."

"We did what we could," said Patricia Holm.

"Chees," said Hoppy Uniatz, "dese mugs ain't never been raised right. I see plenty a suckers take de heat, but dey always get a smoke an' a pull from de bottle foist. I never see nobody get de woiks wit' a toist in him like I got."

With all of them crowded in there, the sweltering heat had filled up the room so that it was like a physical compression, which cramped breathing and weighed into the brain with a relentless pressure that tempted thought into the hazy liberty of delirium. Another snake might have rustled under the floor beneath Peter Quentin, There might have been a repetition of the scuffling sound that he had heard before, the thin creak, and the snap, and a muffled thudding that was not quite the same. The shadows that had been still might have begun moving again. He would not have been sure.

He said roughly: "I hate to remind you, but we weren't talking about your grisly past. We were in the middle of a hot spelling game, and it's up to you, Hoppy. It goes R-I-F-L. And I think we've got you for another life.

"O," said the Saint.

Nobody stirred. It was a stillness in which pins could have dropped on velvet with an ear-stunning clatter.

"I'll challenge you," Peter said at last. "There's no such word."

"Riflolver," said the Saint.

There was a quick march of steps outside, and the door was opened. The single light went on.

Heinrich Friede stood in the entrance, with the sentry just behind him, His lips were flattened over his teeth in a smile of sneering vindictiveness that embraced them all, so that the creases that ran down from his nose cut deeper into his face.

"We are about to leave," he said. "I hope you have enjoyed the anticipation of your own departure. You will not have much longer to wait — perhaps half an hour. I shall press the button as soon as we have reached open water."

Peter and Patricia and Karen and Hoppy looked at him once, but after that they looked more at the Saint. It might have seemed like a tribute to personality or a gesture of loyalty; but the truth was many times more mundane. They were simply letting their eyes confirm the incomprehensible evidence that their ears had offered a few seconds before.

For the Saint was there, sitting at the end of one cot, exactly as they had seen him last, with his hands behind him and the bruises of Friede's violence swelling in his face and his shabby clothes sandy and dishevelled. Only perhaps the reckless disdain of his blue eyes burned brighter and more invincible.

"I hope you have a nice voyage, Heinrich," he said.

"It is a waste of time to tell you," Friede said, "but I should like one particular thought to cheer your last moment. You, in your unimportant dissolution, are only a symbol of what you represent. Just as you have tried to fight us and have been out-generalled and destroyed, so everyone on earth who tries to fight us will be destroyed. The little damage you have done will be repaired; your own futility can not be repaired. Console yourselves with that. The rest of your tribe will soon follow you into your extinction, except those whom we keep for slaves as you once kept other inferior races. So you see, all you have achieved and all you die for is nothing."

The Saint's eyes were unmoving pools of sapphire."It is a waste of time to tell you," he mocked. "But I wish you could know one thing before you die. All that you and your kind will destroy the world for is no more in history than a forest fire. You'll bring your great gifts of blackness and desolation; but one day the trees will be green again and nobody will remember you."

"I leave you to your fantasy," said the captain.

And he was gone, with another click of the switch and a slam of the door.

They heard him striding away, his footfalls dying on the ground outside, waking again hollowly on the planking of the pier, then ceasing altogether. They heard the last crack of command, and a soft splash of water. The seconds ticked away.

"Simon," said Patricia.

"Quiet," said the Saint tensely.

They had only their hearing to build a picture with, and the sounds that reached them seemed to come through the wrong end of an auditory telescope. Even the sentry's footsteps had ceased; and the endless whine of mosquitoes and the chirrup of other insects built up an obscuring fog in which other sounds were confused.

But there might have been some scuffling of wood, and the ring of a distant tramping on metal. There were voices, and a repetition of the deep steady hum that they had heard before, which drowned out the insects for a while, and then was bafflingly equal with them, and then sank away until it was lost in its turn. Then there seemed to be nothing at all but the soft swish of water against the shore and among the mangrove roots.

The owl came back and began moaning again.

But still the Saint kept silence, while minutes seemed to drag out into hours, before he felt sure enough to move.

Then light seemed to crash into the room like thunder as he flipped the switch.

They stared at him as he stood smiling, with his knife in his hand.

"I'm sorry, boys and girls," he said, "but I couldn't take any chances on being overheard."

"We understand," said Peter Quentin. "You're so considerate that we're dazzled to look at you."

Simon was cutting Patricia free. She kissed him as the last cord fell away, and massaged her wrists as he went over to Karen Leith.

As he freed her, she said: "I think — I think we all thought you were loose before."

"I was," said the Saint.

"Of course," said Peter Quentin, as his turn came, "you wouldn't have cared to tell anyone."

"I had something to do, Simon said. He finished with Peter and went on to Hoppy. "I knew there must be a trapdoor in the floor or something, and eventually I found it. The lock was a bit awkward, but I mixed my wood-carving and my strong-arm act, and sort of persuaded it. Then I had to do my worm impersonation with some wriggling and burrowing under the outside shingles — luckily the place is built on piles instead of straight foundations, and the walls don't go into the ground. Eventually I got outside and prowled here and there."

"Boss," said Mr Uniatz, loosening his cramped limbs, "dijja find anyt'ing to drink?"

"There should be something left on the March Hare," said the Saint, "but I didn't investigate."

He went to the door and opened it, standing just outside and filling his lungs with relatively fresh air, while he tamped one of the last two cigarettes from his case. Patricia joined him and took the other one. They stood with their arms linked together, looking across the anchorage where the March Hare still rode in darkness under the moon, but a sheet of unrippled water lay where the submarine had been. There Peter Quentin joined them.

"I don't want to disrupt an idyll," he observed diffidently, "but personally I shouldn't mind being a bit further off when Friede gives his farewell broadcast."

"You needn't worry," said the Saint. "I found it under the floor when I got down there — it was what I was looking for under the trapdoor anyhow. A very innocent packing case labelled 'Tomato Soup.' I hauled it out with me."

"Where did you dump it?" Peter asked suspiciously.

"I parked it with a lot of other cases of canned food that the crew were ferrying out to the submarine. Or they may have been ammunition — I couldn't be sure. Anyway it was quite a difficult business, getting it out on the pier and making it look natural. But I made it, and managed to get back in time."

Karen and Hoppy had completed the group while he talked.

And down to the south-west, where his eyes had been fixed, a pillar of jagged crimson climbed into the blue-grey sky, stamping sharp filgree out of the massed blackness of the jungle and flickering spectrally over the intent turning of their faces. Seconds later the concussion pounded upon their eardrums, mingling with a tornado rush of wind that bowed the trees and drew weird whisperings out of the scrub, seemed like a deafened age before the shuddering earth grew still again.

"And I think Heinrich has pressed the button," said the Saint