The Vulcan Disaster

Chapter Twenty-Two

I checked my watch once before shoving off. It was pitch dark out there on the rocks, but I could make out the luminous numbers on the waterproof watch. Ten-thirty. Across the little bay, the party was in full swing, with bouzouki music tinkling merrily away.

Now, out on the rocks in my wet suit, with the oxygen tanks strapped to my back and the little oilskin package containing my papers, money and weapons snapped on to my belt, I hesitated for a moment before dropping into the bay. I gritted my teeth and stepped off the edge into the cold dark waters.

There’s one nice thing about swim fins: you don’t have to use your arms at all to make good time. I was thanking Leon’s foresight in forcing the underwater gear on me; in that cold water, swimming with my caved-in rib cage would have hurt like hell. Now all I had to do was relax in the water and kick, keeping the head up and a weather eye out for the ship.

It came into view pretty quickly. There were a couple of lights on deck and, to my surprise, the aft section — the Forbidden City, including both Alexandra’s quarters and the old man’s — was brightly lit. I wondered at that; had Alexandra come back to the boat? I hadn’t seen any sign of her in town all evening.

I noticed a skiff tied up below the starboard rail. I filed that information away and decided to swim around the Vulcan and come up the other side.

Clearing the water without a splash and a lot of noisy dripping was a problem, right up to the moment when someone in the skeleton crew left aboard turned on a portable radio and picked up a loud Athens station. Then, just as I was sticking my head over the side, somebody forward yelled for the guy to turn it off.

I froze. The radio went down, but the owner let fly a string of Greek curses at the intruder in the dialect of the Piraeus waterfront. I slowly stuck my head up over the rail. The guy had his back to me, no more than three feet away. I waited until the deck creaked again and used the covering sound to slip up over the side. He never knew what hit him. I gave him a nice karate chop on the side of the neck. I eased him to the deck quietly.

Going below was trickier; it meant opening and closing doors. I slipped into the galley area, dark and unoccupied now, and found the ladder leading down to the next deck. It was ornamental hardwoods all the way; every tiptoed step made its own creak, and I was fully expecting to run into trouble the moment I entered that elegant hallway with the pictures and the tapestries.

Instead I found the area unguarded, but there were still those lights down the way, in the saloon area. I slipped into the unoccupied guard booth — the one with the Alhambra filigree work and the priest’s chair inside it — and shucked the oxygen tank and the flippers. Barefoot, I’d make a lot less noise. And I wrapped the three weapons I carry virtually everywhere and stowed them in their proper places: Wilhelmina in a holster inside the wet suit, Hugo up one sleeve, Pierre down near my crotch. I zipped everything up about halfway. Then I stepped cautiously out into the hall.

There were voices down the way: a man’s and a woman’s. I could make out no more than this until I reached the saloon. Then, as I slipped into the brightly lit area, testing every step for creaks underfoot, I could make out more of the conversation. The voices were coming from the half-closed heavy oak door that, all the time I’d been aboard the Vulcan; had walled away from passengers and crew alike all sight or sound of the owner of the ship, Vassily Alexandrovich Komaroff, arms merchant, dealer in war and destruction.

Only it wasn’t Komaroff talking. It was two other people.

I knew those voices.

Going right through that half-open door didn’t make any sense at all. I didn’t even know the layout of the room.

Someone was coming down the hall behind me.

I ducked into the open door of Alexandra’s room and pulled the door shut behind me. Then I yanked Wilhelmina out and jacked a bullet into the chamber. In the dark it wasn’t easy, but I gradually worked my way through the cushions and accumulated mess of her room to the paneled bulkhead that separated her place from her father’s. Halfway across the cluttered room I could already hear the voices through the wall; it must not, I decided, be as thick as I’d thought.

On the way my bare foot hit something on the floor. I bent over and felt with my free hand. The naked little slave wouldn’t be taking any more beatings; she was cold and dead. I bent my head over her, closer; there was the faint smell of almonds, lingering in the still air. Poison: cyanide.

I stood up again, feeling old and tired, but feeling, also, that Leon had been right. It was the endgame, the one that ends in mate, nice and final. I took a firmer grip on Wilhelmina and edged closer to the wall. I listened to the voices.

“...you double-crossed me, damn you. The transfer was to have been made on Cyprus on the twentieth. There was no ship. We had a deal...”

“Deal? With petty thugs like yourself? With a schoolyard gang of petty thieves and muggers like your Sons of David? Don’t be ridiculous. We accepted your help, here and there, true. You fulfilled a useful function for us along the way, throwing suspicion in another direction. As long as the authorities and their little men in counter-intelligence thought the shipload of arms was intended for a dissident group inside Israel they were thrown off the track; they did not suspect that the arms would be delivered instead, on the twenty-fifth, to the P.L.O., intact, with a new set of papers, off Rhodes. Just in time for... but Shimon, my dear, didn’t you want to provoke a full-scale attack on the Israeli border? Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Yes, but not with a disparity in arms. Not this way. Not only the first line of the Israeli defense will be wiped out, but our own people, our infiltrators, our fifth column. They won’t have a chance.”

“All the better, I say. War is a matter between principals, two in number, Shimon. Two at a time. The more splinter groups there are around, the more messy it becomes when the war is won and it comes time to establish a power structure. There will be no place in the new Palestine, once the Israelis have been annihilated, for quislings like yourself. Nor, for that matter, for fanatics like the Black Septembrists, or for any of their fatuous little friends in Japan and elsewhere...”

“Alexandra — you have taken sides?”

“And why not? When the new government comes to power in the Middle East it will remember its friends in the world of commerce, of business. It...”

“But your father... he always...”

“My father... look at him. He died during the night. When he died, the power that I have effectively wielded ever since his stroke two months ago fell legally into my hands. Look at him. He has been helpless, senile, unable to speak or communicate; meanwhile, our organization has...”

Organization? Was this Alexandra Komarova speaking? Could it be the same woman — the way she was when she wasn’t bombing herself out on drugs every night of her life? I leaned heavily on a panel, holding my aching side...

...And felt the panel give. And heard the voices grow louder.

“Alexandra, you can’t mean this. We had a signed contract. We...”

“Shimon, don’t be a fool. Put that thing down and leave the ship this moment. I give you my word that if you leave right now I will forget this incident, and...”

I pushed the panel open, slowly. It was almost as big as I was; I slipped through silently, gun at the ready, watching the two of them through the curtains that surrounded the old man’s bed. I’d come out inside the curtained canopy, and I was gambling on their being unable to see me. There was a strange smell in the air; I bent over the old man’s face and sniffed. The same burnt-almonds smell; she hadn’t taken any chances on the old man getting better or, worse, recovering.

“No,” Shimon was saying. “No, you are not going to get away with this. Perhaps I... perhaps our movement is doomed. Perhaps not I have two days to move them out of the area, covertly or otherwise. At any rate, you yourself are unlikely to see any of it. You will not survive the night.” His voice was tight, controlled. I could see the grim determination on his face as he spoke, the businesslike attitude of the .357 Webley he held in his trembling hand.

“No, Shimon, don’t...” Too late, she saw how serious he was. She shrank back against a tall bureau, one hand held up in a puny gesture of self-defense. “Please, I...”

There was a roar of gunfire: loud, deafeningly loud.

Shimon’s body twitched twice in a grotesque dance as the two heavy 9mm parabellum slugs hit him amidships, from the side opposite me. His body rammed into the heavy posts of Komaroff’s bed and slipped to the floor; miraculously, the curtain held.

The man with the black eyepatch and the missing arm stood in the open doorway, holding the big PI5 pistol at the same oblique angle across his body, his body tall and erect and military-looking. He hadn’t changed a bit since Saigon. “Alexandra,” he said, “you are losing your effectiveness. How could you let a man like this get the upper hand with you this way?” His voice was deep and harsh, and still had that touch of strange accent. Well, all the places he’d been in the last thirty years, he’d be sure to have a funny accent by now. A bit of this, a bit of that. Particularly if his English had been picked up on the run — in places like Switzerland, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Syria, Lebanon, from people who spoke English with an accent themselves.

“No,” he said again, looking at her with distaste, “you have grown unreliable. Poisoning the old man... did you think there would be no inquiry? You are in Greek waters. Even if you buy off the local magistrate, can you buy off the press? Those damnable drugs you take, they have weakened your mind.” He made no move to step into the room, standing there in the doorway in that odd military stance, his face dark with anger.

“But Kurt... darling... we have won. We have...”

“Two corrections, my dear. One, we have not won. I have won. You no longer figure in the picture. Two...”

“Kurt, no. No, please...”

“Two...” he said. A strange half-smile flitted across his face. “But no, I suppose the second item does not matter now.”

And he pulled the trigger, once, twice. The first bullet blew her brains all over the curtain; the second one was just tossed in there for meanness. It threw her heavily against the bed-curtain and this time the canopy gave.

I gave him one quick glimpse of me standing there in the wet suit, and then I shot the gun out of his hand. The 9mm slug socked the big pistol right at the front sight; a poor enough shot, all in all, but it jarred his hand enough to make him drop it. He thought of bending over — just once. I fired off another round at the gun on the floor and knocked it out of his reach. He straightened back up again.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “It would be... I suppose it would be Mr. Carter, wouldn’t it? I might not have known if it hadn’t been for the meeting in Saigon. Finding you both there — and in close association with Corbin, too — and here too... no, that would be too much of a coincidence, wouldn’t it? Carter it is.”

“Yes,” I said. “Just don’t move a muscle. Keep talking and don’t move a muscle.”

“All right.” There was a thin smile there. He was flexing his one hand; I’d jarred him pretty badly, and it must have hurt. “I... you owe me a life, you know. I saved yours in Saigon. I wonder if I should have done so, now. Perhaps I should have shot both you and Corbin. Perhaps...”

“Why shoot Corbin?” I said. “I didn’t understand that at first. Because he stole the film? To shut him up once he’d run past you in his panic and slipped you the thing in the hall of the Grand-Bretagne, hoping it would buy you off?”

“Neither of these, of course,” he said. “Corbin did indeed know too much... but not that. That wasn’t important. Your people sent first Corbin, and then you, to steal the records of Komaroff’s — well, Globalarms’s — secret transactions in recent months, to see what the pattern was, to see if some idea as to the nature of Globalarms activities could be derived from them.” He sneered delicately. “Worthless, worthless. The thing Corbin knew, and which alone made him worth silencing, was the fact that Komaroff himself was lying here, a vegetable, unable either to halt or to influence any of the activities which his daughter and I had been carrying on in his name. He was the only person not in our confidence who knew this. This alone made it worth my while to follow him around the world and silence him before you — or anyone else — could get to him. He hoped to finance his escape from both of us — me and you — by acting as a sort of go-between in the disposal of the arms shipment Herr Meyer was meddling with. Unfortunately for that theory, we had already made our plans for that arms shipment — plans which we implemented well out to sea. With, I might add, the covert connivance of a former assistant of your friend the General’s, who double-crossed him neatly and delivered the arms to us instead. Now, if things are on schedule, the arms are being delivered” — he looked at his watch — “no, have already been delivered to the P.L.O., not off Rhodes — Alexandra got so many things wrong — but in Egyptian waters. The attack will take place precisely as planned.”

“One thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Now that the plan for the Syrian-border attack is operational, why kill Alexandra? Why not continue to use her?”

“Who needs her? You forget, I have the microfilm. Worthless to you as intelligence, but priceless to me as a list of business contacts. I have all Komaroff’s — Globalarms’s — suppliers and distributors. And, with the present deal, I have proved my ability to deliver — proved it to the satisfaction of anyone in the arms business in the world. I am, as you say, back in business again.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “You’re out of business as of right now.”

“You wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man. Besides, I saved your life. I...”

“And you murdered two of my friends right after that. I owe you something, all right...”

“Two of your...? Oh, yes. Oh, I see. And now I remember the strange telephone call I got right afterward. Yes. Yes, Mr. Carter, I underrated you, I think. My apologies. My...”

He dived for the door. I went after him and as I reached the frame he slammed it on me and sent Wilhelmina flying. There wasn’t time to go chasing her. I kicked the door open and followed him in.

He was armed; strangely so. He held one of the two Toledo swords he’d yanked from the wall. The other lay at his feet. With a thin smile he kicked it my way. “Here,” he said. “I have saved your life and killed your friends. Perhaps that means we are square.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “This is your last day on earth, whatever you may think.” I picked up the second sword.

“Very well,” he said. “As you wish. But in the meantime, a bit of sport? The only kind of fair fight you can have with a man with one arm?”

“Sure,” I said. “Cutting your guts out will be more fun than shooting you anyhow. I...”

He attacked. And from the first I knew my bravado action was not going to get me far. I hadn’t fenced in years, and these things were a lot heavier than epees.

His attack was tough stuff: strong, vicious, expert. I was in trouble almost immediately. Bad trouble. The kind you die from...