Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (21 page)

He ushered her out before him, and then roared, “C’mon then, for Chrissakes! Watcha all waiting for? Move it!”

The ragged, limping column began to thread its way back up through the ship. Hely wondered why being honest was so much more difficult than being dishonest. Rogo could have had her. One last time would have made no difference. It was nothing. It was a thing she’d done a million times. Suddenly she wanted to be sick. She did not know what Rogo’s answer would have been.

There was always home to go back to. That had been the one reassurance he had allowed himself throughout the whole nightmare of Vietnam. Jason remembered that quite clearly as he climbed. He went at an even pace up the ladder which scaled the inside of the shaft. Hand over hand, step by step, rung after rung. It was a long way. The silver stripes of the rungs stretched beyond his flashlight’s range.

One day, he recalled telling himself, it would all be over and he would be back in the sure and sunlit world he knew. It had been quite exciting at first. He had tried to imagine what it would be like in Vietnam. Truckloads of American soldiers surging into small towns, the streets lined with people, bouquets of flowers, the cheering, the hero’s welcome.

And there had been crowds. Crowds of whores and pimps and buyers and sellers and wheeler-dealers, and every smile had a price tag on it. The girls all loved him. By the hour, at the going rate. It was hard to feel like a hero then.

And it was hard too to understand why he was there. It had been so clear before he came. Democracy and freedom, the things he had known in abstract all his life. Patriotism was as simple as baseball. It was different when the black leaves blotted out the wicked blue of the Vietnamese skies, and the silence was itself a conspiracy. Then the unheard whispering among the leaves turned into the mad gossip of gunfire. Then, at his feet, a tiny, twisted body and an anonymous brown face. After that, they fell from the trees like ripe apples, because this was the will of the American people. Then it wasn’t the will of the American people anymore. Helicopters dropped from the skies and plucked them off the surface of that suffering land, and all that remained was the memory of one brown face, the only one that never had a price tag on it.

The rungs felt cold in his hands. He remembered thinking in the helicopter that it was all over. He was going home. Back to normality, back to clean streets; back to old friends and old habits, and the warmth of familiarity would strike the shivers from his bones. But his own father could not lift his eyes. He gripped his hand hard and said something about a terrible mistake. The soothing peace of home became a searing shame. No one would talk about Vietnam. They tried to protect him from his own guilt, and his presence only served to stab their own consciences.

“Hi, where’ve ya been all this time? Must be two years, nearly. Oh. Gotta be going now. See ya again . . .” They called it Away. “While you were Away . . .” The same word some people use for jail.

So after that Jason flung himself into everyone’s battles. In Cyprus, in Lebanon, in Africa. He became an amateur mercenary, a soldier of misfortune, and he took on the grief of the world to assuage his own.

He had been wrong. He was sure of that, as he neared the top of the ladder. But this time at least, he was right. Just for one day the truth was clear. Rogo’s rough-hewn integrity must not fall before the unalloyed wickedness of Bela. There was Hely too. Jason had at last found a cause, and a reward.

He saw the entrance to the last duct at the top of the shaft, leaned over and swung himself into it. He was now at the very top of the inverted ship. He began crawling.

“LIKE YOUR PRESENT, ROGO?”

12

For the second time that morning, the smartly painted pinnace from the
Komarevo
came up alongside the jutting remains of the
Poseidon.
This time it was followed by another, and both sat low in the still waters. In each boat there were eight men. Each one carried a Stechkin. Each one was uniformed in maroon sweater and roll-on woolen hat. They looked exactly like what they were: a war party.

Captain Bela regarded them with pride. Their demeanor reflected his own firm belief in discipline and order. This time, he thought, there would be no mistakes.

He checked his watch. It had taken him little more than half an hour to organize this expedition. A rescue flotilla could not possibly arrive for well over another hour. He had enough men to move the cargo expeditiously, and they were sufficiently well equipped in both arms and experience to cope with any further intrusions. Captain Bela drew on his cigar and, quite consciously allowing himself a little vanity, decided that he had recovered the situation to his satisfaction.

Anton and the other two, he thought, would almost certainly be pursuing Jason and his friends through the ship. Perhaps they had killed them, perhaps not. If they returned by the time the gold had been moved to the
Komarevo,
well and good. If not, then they and any remaining survivors would die when the
Poseidon
finally sank. For sink it definitely would. The grenades on the belt around his waist might help to finish off the stricken ship. It would, after all, be the tidiest of endings to a messy affair. The
Magt
would, of course, be dragged down too, and the world would doubtless be appropriately saddened that a gallant rescue operation should end in such tragedy. But then, thought the captain, the world was easily saddened.

With a flick of slim fingers, he sent the stub of the cigar hissing into the sea. He had never seen a sea so calm, he thought. It was as well. It would make the process of transferring the cargo that much easier and quicker.

He rose in the bow as they tied up to the whale-shaped hulk and reached out for the ragged edge of the entrance they had cut out earlier in the day. He would lead the party on board. He raised himself with a thrust of the foot and felt the sharp edge of steel tear at his finger. “Damn!” he said, and dropped back down into the pinnace. Otherwise, the shot would have hit him between the eyes.

He felt the light sweat cool his face, and held the cut finger to his lips.
It must be Jason.
He thought quickly and without panic. The only guns on board were the ones his men had. Somehow Jason and the others must have disarmed at least one of them. At the very most they could have three pistols, and they were unlikely to present much of an obstacle to his crew.

Quickly he explained the situation to the two boatloads of men. “Go in commando style,” he instructed. “They can only get a sight of you when you are silhouetted against the sky. Roll in fast and they are bound to lose you in the dark. Make your way up into the stern, up under the prop shafts. There’s plenty of cover. All the engine-room machinery is smashed up.”

Without question or hesitation, the men rose to obey him.

“Did you get him?”

Rogo answered Martin’s question with a disappointed shake of the head. “Naw, the bastard ducked just as I was squeezing off the shot. That’s one bullet wasted.”

They were crouching behind a huge central steam turbine which, when the ship turned over, had been uprooted from its moorings and crashed down between the hold and the now drained shaft that led to the funnel. They had arrived in the empty engine room full of hope, and it was not until Klaas climbed the rope ladder that they saw the two boats packed with
Komarevo
men. The turbine provided the best cover, and, as Rogo had pointed out, it meant they could keep Bela from reaching the gold. Beyond that, there were no plans they could make.

“How many did you say there were, Klaas?” Rogo asked.

“Over a dozen,” the Dutchman replied. “As far as I could see they were all heavily armed. With those big automatics, I think.”

“Holy Christ!” Rogo said, more to himself than to the others. He looked around at them and once again despaired. A Dutchman who didn’t like fighting, a haberdasher on one leg, a nurse, a schoolgirl, and a skin diver who was suspect anyway. His was the only gun, and they were facing over a dozen well-armed, well-trained killers. They might as well take on the entire marine corps!

He was on his knees, peering around the side of the vast metal drum at the square of blue across the width of the ship. Behind them, a little to the right, the hold door stood open, and even in there the brightness of the morning caught the bars of gold. The heavy stench of the tiger was still in the air.

“What kind of a chance have we got?” Martin asked. He was slumped against the turbine, his bared and crushed foot raised on a broken stanchion. His face seemed to have shrunk even smaller with pain and fear, and the terrier eagerness had gone from him.

Rogo was past being considerate. He fell back on the sarcasm that was his customary defense. “Oh, no problem at all, Martin,” he said. “Just walk over there and tell that Commie pirate you gotta get back to open the shop and he’ll run ya home. What chance?”

Coby’s eyes looked as big as dinner plates in her pretty face. “There must be something we can do, Mr. Rogo.”

He looked over his shoulder and said, a little less unkindly, “Don’t forget that’s American dough in there. They’ll be along. We just gotta hope we can hold these sharks off long enough.” He lifted the barrel of the gun. “But how long d’ya figure it’ll take ’em to realize we only got one gun?”

The nurse began to whimper. Hely, who had said nothing since her confrontation with Rogo, put an arm around her. Klaas consulted his watch. He looked very grave as he said to Rogo, “I cannot see any official rescue flotilla getting here yet. Any passing craft will simply assume that Bela’s salvage vessel is handling it.”

Rogo’s eyes were still on the entrance, his gun cocked. “We might fool ’em for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. After that they’re gonna work out our firepower and the show’s over, folks.”

He looked round at them all again. “I’m sorry,” he added, and they nodded mutely. They understood the frustration of his impotence. They understood too that the cop, tough as he was, had been under tremendous strain. He seemed lost without Jason now.

Between gritted teeth, Rogo muttered, “Here they come, the stinking bastards!” The sill of the clean square of blue changed shape for a second as a flattened body rolled over the edge and they heard the bumping and clatter as it landed. Rogo fired, but they knew from his mumbled obscenity that he had missed. He steadied his arm against their metal defense bulwarks ready for the next one. Again the straight black line along the base of the blue square wavered, and again he signaled his failure with an oath.

He turned and dropped onto his haunches among the others. “Let ’em come,” he said, and rested the gun barrel on the floor.

The nurse stifled her sobs and whispered, “Mr. Rogo, please don’t give up. You’re our only hope.”

His face looked aged and sunken as he glanced at her. “I’m just wasting bullets. I can’t get a clear shot at them there. We’ll just have to let ’em come in and see if we can pick ’em off then.”

They could hear the scuffling of the
Komarevo
men swarming aboard. From the noise, it was clear that they were moving into the very end of the stern.

Rogo flinched. A small, sharp object had landed on his head. He picked it up from beside his foot. It was a screw. Then he ducked as he felt another light smack, this time on the ear, and he rubbed the spot and mumbled, “What the hell . . .” and looked upwards.

“Flies annoying you, Batman?”

They all started at the familiar voice, and gazed up. Twenty feet above them, nonchalantly perched on a crosspiece of broken handrail like an owl on a branch, was Jason. He flipped another screw to Rogo, swung down to a lower pipe, and then jumped the rest. He landed squatting at Rogo’s feet, grinning at him and said, “I had to come back, Rogo. It’s the only game in town.”

Hely’s face, set and silent before, came alive. She flung her arms round him and buried her beaming smile in his shoulder. Jason sowed a small kiss in her shining hair.

“How in hell’s name . . .” Rogo began, but Jason cut him short. “Not now, Rogo. Explanations later, okay? We’ve got to entertain the visitors.” He thumbed towards the stern. “How many are there?”