The Dark Crusader (18 page)

And on. I thought I would never come to the end of it. There had been no archaeological excavations made here, it was just a plain and straightforward tunnel quite unconcerned with what lay on either side of it. It was a tunnel that was going someplace. I was having to walk on the ties now, the diameter had narrowed to half of what it had been at first, and I noticed that the gradient was slightly upward all the time. I noticed, too, that the air in the tunnel, and this at least a mile and a half after I'd left the mine entrance, was still fresh, and I guess that that explained the upward slant of the tunnel-it was being kept deliberately near the rising slope of the mountain-side to facilitate the driving of vertical ventilation shafts. I must have been at least halfway across to the western side of the island by then and it wasn't very hard to guess that it wouldn't be long before the tunnel floor levelled out and started to descend.

It wasn't. The stretch of level floor, when I came to it, didn't extend more than a hundred yards, and then it began to dip. Just as the descent began my right hand failed to find the tunnel wall. I risked a quick snap of the torch and saw a thirty-foot deep cavern to my right, half full of rock and debris. For one moment I thought this must be the scene of yesterday's blasting, but a second look put that thought out of my mind. There were a couple of hundred tons of loose rock lying there, far too much for one day's work, and besides, there was no percentage in driving suddenly north, into the heart of the mountain. This was just a storage dump, one probably excavated some time ago to provide a convenient deposit for the rock blasted from the tunnel proper, when the need arose to do that quickly.

Less than three hundred yards further on I found the end of the tunnel. I rubbed my forehead, which had been the part of me that had done the finding, then switched on the tiny pencil-beam of light. There were two small boxes lying o» the floor, both nearly empty, but still holding a few charges of blasting powder, detonators and fuses: this, beyond doubt, was the scene of yesterday's blasting. I played the torch beam over the end of the tunnel and that was all it was, just the end of a tunnel, a seven-foot high by four-foot wide solid face of rock. And then I saw that it wasn't all solid, not quite. Just below eye-level a roughly circular rock about a foot in diameter appeared to have been jammed into a hole in the wall. I eased out this lump of limestone and peered into the hole behind. It was maybe four feet long, tapering inwards to perhaps two inches and at the far end I could see something faintly twinkling, red and green and white. A star. I put the rock back in position and left.

It took me half an hour to get back to the first of the four caverns. I investigated the two openings leading off to the south, but they led only to two further caverns, neither of them with exits. I headed back along the railway till I came to the third of the caverns from the entrance, examined the two openings in this one and achieved nothing apart from getting myself lost in a maze for almost half an hour. And then I came to the second cavern.

Of the two tunnels leading off to the north, I passed up the one where Hewell had been working. I'd find nothing there. I found nothing in the neighbouring one either. And, of course, there would be nothing behind the timber baulks holding up the entrances to the two collapsed tunnels to the south. I made for the exit leading to the outer cavern when the thought occurred to me that the only reason I had for believing that those baulks of timber supported the entrances to a couple of caved-in tunnels was that Professor Wither-spoon himself had told me they did and, apart from the fact that he knew nothing about archaeology, the only certain fact that I had so far established about the professor was that he was a fluent liar.

But he hadn't been lying about the first of these two tunnels. The heavy vertical three-by-six timbers that blocked the entrance were jammed immovably in place and when I pressed my torch against a half-inch gap between two of the timbers and switched it on I could clearly see the solid mass of stone and rubble that completely blocked the passage behind, all the way from the floor to the collapsed roof, Maybe I'd been doing the professor an injustice.

And then again maybe I hadn't. Two of the timber baulks guarding the entrance to the second barricaded tunnel were loose.

No pickpocket ever lifted a wallet with half the delicate care and soundless stealth that I used to lift one of these baulks out of position and lean it against its neighbour. A brief pressure on the torch button showed no signs of a roof collapse anywhere, just a dingy grey smooth-floored tunnel stretching and dwindling away into the darkness. I lifted a second batten out of place and squeezed through the gap into the tunnel beyond.

It was then that I discovered that I couldn't replace the battens from the inside. One, yes, but even then only roughly in place, but it was impossible to manoeuvre the other through the six-inch gap that was left. There was nothing I could do about it. I left it as it was and went down the tunnel.

Thirty yards and the tunnel turned abruptly to the left. I was still guiding myself as I had done earlier on, by brushing the back of my right hand against the wall, and suddenly the wall fell away to the right. I reached in cautiously and touched something cold and metallic. A key, hanging on a hook. I reached beyond it and traced out the outlines of a low narrow wooden door hinged on a heavy vertical post of timber. I took down the key, located the keyhole, softly turned the lock and opened the door a fraction of an inch at a time. My nostrils twitched to the pungent combined smells of oil and sulphuric acid. I eased the door another two inches. The hinges creaked in sepulchral protest, I had the sudden vision of a gibbet and a swaying corpse turning in the night wind and the corpse was myself, then I snapped abruptly to my senses, realised that the time for pussyfooting was over, passed quickly round the door and closed it behind me as I switched on the torch.

There was no one there. One quick traverse of the torch beam round a cave no more than twenty feet in diameter was enough to show me that there was no one there: but there were signs that someone had been there, and very recently.

I moved forward, stubbed my toe heavily against something solid, looked down and saw a large lead-acid accumulator. Wires from this led to a switch on the wall. I pressed the switch and the cave was flooded with light.

Perhaps 'flooded' is the wrong word, it was just by comparison with the weak beam from my torch. A naked lamp, forty watts or thereabouts, suspended from the middle of the roof: but it gave all the illumination I wanted.

Stacked in the middle of the chamber were two piles of oiled yellow boxes. I was almost certain what they were before I crossed to examine them, and as soon as I saw the stencils on top I was certain. The last time I had seen those boxes with the legend 'Champion Spark Plugs' stencilled on them was in the hold of Fleck's schooner. Machine-gun ammunition and ammonal explosive. So perhaps I hadn't been imagining things after all when I thought I had seen lights that night we'd been marooned on the reef. I had seen lights. Captain Fleck unloading cargo.

By the right-hand wall were two wooden racks, holding twenty machine-pistols and automatic carbines of a type I had never seen before: they were heavily coated with grease against the drippingly damp atmosphere of the cave. Stacked beside the racks were three squarish metal boxes, for a certainty ammunition for the guns. I looked at the racked guns and the boxes and for the first time in my life I could understand how a gourmet felt when he sat down to an eight-course dinner prepared by a cordon-bleu chef. And then I opened the first box, the second and the third, and I knew exactly how the same gourmet would have felt if, while still adjusting his napkin, the maitre d'hotel had come along and told him that the shop was shut for the night.

The boxes contained not a single round of carbine or machine-pistol ammunition. One box contained black blasting powder, another beehive blocks of amatol explosive and a drum of .44 short-gun ammunition, the third primers, fulminate of mercury detonators, about a hundred yards R.D.X. fuses and a flat tin case of chemical igniters, most of it stuff, presumably, that Hewell used in his blasting operations. And that was all. My pipe dreams about a loaded machine-pistol and the radical difference it would make to the balance of power on the island were just that, pipe dreams and no more. Ammunition without guns to fire them, guns without ammunition to fit them. Useless, all useless.

I switched out the light and left. It would have taken me only five minutes to wreck the firing mechanisms on every carbine and machine pistol there. I was going to spend the rest of my days bitterly regretting the fact that the thought had never even occurred to me.

Twenty yards further on I came to a similar door on the right of the tunnel wall. No key to this one: it didn't need it for the door wasn't locked. I laid a gentle hand on the knob, turned it and eased the door open a couple of inches. The stench of foetid air that issued through the narrow crack was an almost physical blow in my face, a putrescent mephitis that wrinkled my nostrils in nauseated repugnance and lifted all the hairs on the back of my head. I felt suddenly very cold.

I opened the door further, passed inside and shut it behind me. The switch was in the same place as it had been in the previous cavern. I pressed it and looked round the cave.

But this was no cave. This was a tomb.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Friday 1:30 A.M.-3:30 A.M.

Some freak in the atmosphere of the cave, possibly a combination of the moisture and the phosphate of lime, had maintained the bodies in a state of almost perfect preservation. Decomposition had set in, but to a negligible extent only, certainly not enough to mar any of the essential features of the nine corpses lying where they had been flung in a rough row at the far end of the cave. The dark stains on white and khaki shirt-fronts made it easy to see how they had died.

Again the ice-chill hand of fear touched the back of my neck. I looked quickly around as if expecting to see the old man with the scythe still waiting patiently in some dark corner of the cave. Waiting for Bentall. Only, there were no dark corners. Nothing, except the round smooth dank walls, the shabby stained bundles on the floor and the battery supplying feeble power to the dim yellow lamp, barely more than head high, that dangled from the centre of the low-vaulted roof.

With my hand to my nose and breathing through my mouth only, I switched on my torch to give extra illumination and scanned the dead faces.

Six of the dead men were complete strangers to me, labourers by the looks of their clothes and hands, and I knew I had never seen them before. But the seventh I recognised immediately. White hair, white moustache, white beard, here was the real Professor Witherspoon: even in death his resemblance to the impostor who had taken his place was startling in its closeness. Beside him lay a giant of a man, a man with red hair and a great red handle-bar moustache: this, beyond any doubt, would be the Dr. 'Red' Carstairs whose portrait I had been shown in a magazine. The ninth man, in a much better state of preservation than the others, I identified without a second glance: his presence there confirmed that the men who had advertised for a second fuel research specialist had indeed been in need of one: it was Dr. Charles Fairfield, my old chief in the Hepworth and Ordnance Fuel Research, one of the eight scientists who had been lured out to Australia.

Sweat was pouring down my face but I was shivering with cold. What was Dr. Fairfield doing there? Why had he been killed? Old Fairfield was the last man to stumble upon anything. A brilliant man in his own field, he was as shortsighted as a dodo and had a monumental incuriosity about everybody and everything except his own work and his consuming private passion for archaeology. And the archaeological tie-up between Fairfield and Witherspoon was so blindingly obvious that it just didn't make any sense at all. Whatever reason lay behind Dr. Fairfield's sudden disappearance from England, nothing was more certain than that it was entirely unconnected with whatever pick and shovel expertise he might show in abandoned mine-workings. But then what in the name of God was he doing here?

I felt as if I were in an ice-box, but the sweat was trickling more heavily than ever down the back of my neck. Still holding the torch in my right hand-the knife was in my left-I worked a handkerchief out of my right trouser pocket and mopped the back of my neck. To the left and front of me I caught a momentary flash of something glittering on the wall of the cave, something metallic, obviously, reflecting the beam of the still burning torch. But what? What metallic object was there? Apart from the dead men the only other objects in that cave were the light fitting and the light switch, and both were made of bakelite. I held the torch and handkerchief, both still over my shoulder, perfectly steady. The glimmer of light on the cave wall was still there. I stood like a statue, my eyes never leaving that gleam on the wall. The light moved.

My heart stopped. The medical profession can say what it likes, but my heart stopped. Then slowly, carefully, I brought down both torch and handkerchief, transferred the torch to my left hand as if to enable me to shove my handkerchief away with my right, then dropped the handkerchief, clutched the hilt of the knife in my right hand and whirled round all in one half second of time.

There were two of them, no more than four feet inside the cave, still fifteen feet distant from me. Two Chinese, already moving wide apart to encircle me, one in dungaree trousers and cotton shirt, the other in a pair of cotton shorts, both big muscular men, both in their bare feet. Their unwinking eyes, the oriental immobility of the yellow faces served only to emphasize, not mask, the cold implacability of the expressions. You didn't have to know your Emily Post to realise that they just weren't paying a social call. Nor would Emily have given them any medals for their calling cards, two of the most lethal-looking double-edged throwing knives I'd ever seen: the books on etiquette covered practically every possible situation in which strangers first made the other's acquaintance, but they'd missed out on this one.