Jack Higgins (19 page)

And then he was gone, the Land-Rover disappearing into the rain with a roar. When I turned, Ilana had sunk down on her knees beside the door, leaning against the wall, crying steadily.

I went forward and took her by the elbow. Her sheepskin coat was unbuttoned for some reason and as I pulled her up, it opened and the money belt fell to the ground.

I stared down at it in stupefaction, then picked it up awkwardly with my left hand. “What's this?” I said hoarsely.

“The emeralds,” she said. “Don't you understand? He slipped them under my coat when he was saying goodbye.”

Perhaps I had lost more blood than I realised or maybe I was moving into shock, but suddenly nothing seemed to make too much sense any more.

I shook my head as if to clear my sight and said carefully, “But why would he do that? What on earth could he hope to accomplish?”

And then it hit me with the force of a thunderbolt, and
I realised what his eyes had been trying to say in those last moments before the Land-Rover had driven away into the fog. When I looked up, Ilana was staring at me in horror as if she too had suddenly discovered the only possible explanation.

She shook her head dumbly and I pushed the belt inside my flying jacket and grabbed her arm. “The jeep, where is it?”

“Somewhere behind the barn.”

I turned and ran and heard her call through the rain. “Don't leave me, Joe! Don't leave me!” There was panic in her voice.

I found the jeep, just as she had said, but with one difference. It was standing in a lake of petrol, a bullet hole in the tank and I turned, ignoring her desperate cry, scrambled over the wall and ran through the meadow.

I was wasting my time, I suppose I knew that from the start and yet nothing in this world could have stopped me. I clambered over the fence at the bottom of the meadow and as I went down the slope through the willow trees, the engine of the Otter coughed angrily in the rain below and roared into life.

As I reached the top of the crag, the Otter roared down the fjord, the engine note deepening so that I knew she was lifting off. There was a sudden crashing through the trees behind me as Ilana arrived and at the same moment, a wind coming down from the ice-cap swept the rain to one side like a giant curtain and I saw the Otter for the last time, five hundred feet up and climbing into the morning.

And then she turned, as I knew she would, and came
back across the fjord, heading straight for that great wall of stone and going like a bomb.

God knows what happened in that cabin during those last few minutes. I suppose Vogel must have emptied his gun into him, but he held her on the course of his own choosing, straight and true, Jack Desforge, that magnificent, wonderful bastard going out as he had lived in a blaze of glory.

The explosion echoed between the hills as a ball of fire erupted against the side of the mountain and then mercifully, the wind died and the curtain of rain dropped back into place.

 

I think that at that moment I could have sat down and wept for him and for the cruel senseless waste of it all, but there was no time for that now. Ilana stood staring into the void, then turned and stumbled towards me, tears streaming down her face. I pulled her against my chest and stroked her hair with my one good hand.

“Why did he do it, Joe? Why?” she said brokenly.

I could have given her the obvious answer. That he was tired, that he'd had enough, that he knew, as I had told him, that there was no place on earth for him to hide, but I could do better for him than that.

“To save us,” I said. “He agreed to fly Vogel out to save us and for no other reason. But somewhere along the line he was going to get a bullet in the head, he knew that. He decided to take them with him, that's all. There isn't a newspaper or magazine in the world that won't swallow that hook line and sinker. They'll believe it because they want to believe it.”

“And Arnie? What about Arnie?”

“Vogel and Stratton killed Arnie,” I said patiently. “I thought you knew that.”

She stood there staring at me, a hand to her mouth and I patted her on the shoulder and said gently, “Now go back to the farmhouse like a good girl. I'll be along later.” She hesitated and I gave her a push. “Go on.”

She stared up through the grove and I watched her go. She paused at the edge of the trees and turned. “You won't leave me, Joe?”

“No, I won't leave you, Ilana.”

I waited till she had gone then scrambled over the edge of the crag and slowly and painfully made my way down to the beach. Whichever way you looked at it, it was ironic. By this time next year somebody would probably be sinking a million or so into a film of it all. I wondered who they'd get to play me and suddenly the whole thing seemed so ludicrous that I started to laugh and the sound of it echoed back across the water as if Desforge was laughing with me.

I found the horseshoe of black rocks on the beach where I had hidden from Stratton earlier, with no difficulty and slumped down wearily. What happened to me now didn't seem to matter. After all, what could they do? Probably a deportation order and maybe I'd lose my licence, but both these things seemed relatively trivial.

One thing was certain. Nothing must be allowed to diminish the magnificence of that final sacrifice. I took the money belt from inside my flying jacket, opened the pouches one by one and emptied them of the pebbles they contained.

The emeralds were where I had left them in a little pile under a flat stone. Slowly and with great difficulty because I could only use my left hand, I started to replace them.