The Dark Crusader (33 page)

"Congratulations," I said bitterly.

"They are in order," he said calmly. "Fleck believes me. It wasn't difficult to convince him. He was on the other side of the island this morning and found a dead man-or what was left of him-a Fijian, I think, floating out near the reef. He thought it was sharks. He doesn't now. His mate has gone to investigate."

"But-but the fight?"

"LeClerc came out of the hangar. He was watching us closely, much too closely. It was the only way to kill suspicion." I looked up and he was smiling. "We managed to exchange quite a bit of information as we were rolling around."

"Captain Griffiths," I said, "you deserve a battleship for this."

The sun sunk down towards the sea. Two Chinese brought us some food, mostly tinned, and beer. I saw another couple take some across to the blockhouse where the seven women were still held, probably as additional security against our making trouble. Lieutenant Brookman fixed my arm again and he didn't seem too happy with its condition. All afternoon the Chinese and about half the sailors, closely supervised by Hewell, were dismantling two gantries and setting them up one on either side of the railway track in preparation for lifting the Shrike into its metal crate, which was already in position on a pair of bogies. And all the time I wondered about Marie in her loneliness, whether she was asleep or awake, how she felt, whether she thought about me, whether her despair was half as deep as mine.

Shortly before sunset Fleck and Henry came strolling along the sands from the other side of the pier. They stopped directly opposite me, Fleck with his legs spread and arms akimbo. Griffiths shook his fist at him, there would be no doubt in any watcher's mind that another violent argument, verbal or otherwise, was about to begin. I rolled over on my right elbow, the most natural thing in the world if one heard two people arguing over one's head. Fleck's brown hard face was set and grim.

"Henry found them all right." His voice was husky with anger. "Eleven. Dead. The rotten lying murderous devil." He swore bitterly and went on: "God knows I play rough, but not that rough. He told me they were prisoners, that I was to find them by accident tomorrow and take them back to Fiji."

I said: "Do you think there's going to be any tomorrow for you, Fleck? Don't you see the armed sentry on the pier waiting to see you don't make a break for it with your ship? Don't you see you'll have to go the same way as the rest. He can't leave anyone behind who'll talk."

"I know. But I'm all right, tonight, anyway, I can sleep on my schooner tonight, a coaster from Fiji by the name of
Grasshopper
and manned by the most murderous crew of Asiatics in the Pacific is coming here at dawn. I've got to pilot them through the reefs." For all his anger, Fleck was playing his part well, gesticulating violently with every second word.

"What's the coaster for?" I asked.

"Surely it's obvious?" It was Griffiths who replied. "A big vessel couldn't approach the pier, there's only ten feet or so of water, and though they could load the rocket on to Fleck's after deck he hasn't anything in the crane line big enough to transship it to a submarine. I'll bet this coaster has a jumbo derrick, eh, Heck?"

"Yes, it has. Submarine? What-"

"It can wait," I interrupted. "Did Henry find the radio?"

"No," Henry himself replied, lugubrious as ever. "They've blasted down the roof at the other end of the tunnel and sealed it off."

And tomorrow, I thought, they'll shove us all inside this end of the tunnel and seal that off. Maybe LeClerc hadn't been lying when he said he wouldn't shoot us, starvation wasn't as quick as shooting but it was just as effective.

"Well, Fleck," I said, "how do you like it. You've got a daughter in the University of California in Santa Barbara, right next to one of the biggest intercontinental ballistic missile bases in the world, the Vanderberry Air Force Base, a number one target for a hydrogen bomb. The Asiatics sweeping down on your adopted country of Australia. All those dead men-"

"For God's sake, shut up!" he snarled. His fists were tightly clenched and fear and desperation and anger fought in his face. "What do you want me to do?"

I told him what I wanted him to do.

The sun touched the rim of the sea, the guards came for us and we were marched away to the blockhouse. As we went in I looked back and saw the floodlight going up outside the hangar. LeClerc and his men would be working all through the night. Let them work. If Fleck came through, there was an even chance the Black Shrike would never reach its destination.

If Fleck came through.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Saturday 3 A.M.-8 A.M.

I awoke in the darkness of the night. I'd been asleep four hours, maybe six, I didn't know, all I knew was that I didn't feel any the better for it; the heat in that sealed antechamber of the blockhouse was oppressive, the air was stuffy and foul and the mattress-making companies had little to fear from the manufacturers of concrete.

I sat up stiffly and because the only thing I had left me were my few remaining shreds of pride I didn't shout out at the top of my voice when I inadvertently put some weight on my left hand. It was near as a toucher, though. I leaned my good shoulder against the wall and someone stirred beside me.

"You awake, Bentall?" It was Captain Griffiths.

"Uh-huh. What's the time?"

"Just after three o'clock in the morning."

"Three o'clock!" Captain Fleck had promised to make it by midnight at the latest. "Three o'clock. Why didn't you wake me, captain?"

"Why?"

Why indeed. Just so that I could go round the bend with worry, that was why. If there was one thing certain it was that there was nothing I or anyone else could do about getting out of that place. For thirty minutes after we'd been locked in Griffiths, Brookman and myself had searched with matches for one weak spot in either the walls or the door or that ante-chamber, a hopelessly optimistic undertaking when you consider that those walls had been built of reinforced concrete designed to withstand the sudden and violent impact of many tons of air pressure. But we had to do it. We had found what we expected, nothing.

"No sound, no movement outside?" I asked.

"Nothing. Just nothing at all."

"Well," I said bitterly, "it would have been a pity to spoil the fine record I've set up."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that every damned thing I've touched on this damned job has gone completely wrong. When it comes to sheer consistency, Bentall's your man. Too much to hope for a change at this late hour." I shook my head in the dark. "Three hours overdue. At least three hours. He's either tried and been caught or they've locked him up as a precaution. Not that it matters now."

"I think there's still a chance," Griffiths said. "Every fifteen minutes or so one of my men has stood on another's shoulders and looked through the ventilation grill. Can't see anything of interest, of course, just the hill on one side and the sea on the other. The point is that there has been brilliant moonlight nearly all night. Make it impossible for Fleck to get away unobserved from his ship. He might get the chance yet."

"Nearly all night, you said. Nearly?"

"Well, there was a dark patch, lasting maybe half an hour, round about one o'clock," he admitted reluctantly.

"He wouldn't want half an hour, fifteen minutes would be all he needed," I said heavily. "There's no future in kidding ourselves."

There was no future anyway. I'd expected far too much. To expect him to slip away unobserved from his ship, in clear moonlight, with a guard on the pier and a working party with brilliant floodlamps not a hundred yards away, was to expect a little bit too much: and to expect him afterwards to reach unseen the captain's hut where the keyboard was, not fifty yards from the hangar, steal the keys, free Marie from the armoury and then free us-well, it had been expecting far too much altogether. But it had been the only shadow of hope that we had had, and the clutch of a drowning man is pretty fierce.

The time dragged on, a night that could never end but, for all that, a night that would end all too soon. I don't think anyone slept, there would be time and to spare for rest later on. The scientists and their wives murmured away softly most of the time, it occurred to me with a sense of shock that I wouldn't have been able to identify any of those women had I met them again, I had never yet seen one in daylight. The air became more and more vitiated, breathing in that foul used-up atmosphere was becoming painful, the heat became steadily worse and sweat dripped from my face, ran down my arms and back. Every now and then a seaman would be hoisted up to look through the grill, and every time he had the same report: bright moonlight.

Every time, that was, until four o'clock. The seaman had no sooner reached eye-level to the grill than he called out: "The moon's gone. It's pitch dark outside. I can't see-"

But I never did hear what he couldn't see. There came from outside in quick succession the sounds of a quick rush of feet, a scuffle, a heavy blow and then a metallic scratching as someone fumbled for the keyhole. Then a solid click, the door swung open and the cool sweet night air flooded into the room.

"Fleck?" Griffiths said softly.

"Fleck it is. Sorry to be late but-"

"Miss Hopeman," I interrupted. "She there?"

"Afraid not. Armoury key wasn't on the board. I spoke to her through the window bars, she told me to give you this." He thrust a paper into my hand.

"Anyone with a match?" I asked. "I want-"

"It's not urgent," Fleck said. "She wrote it this afternoon. Been waiting for a chance to-" he broke off. "Come on. No time to waste. That damn moon isn't going to stay behind a cloud all night."

"He's right, you know," Griffiths said. He called softly: "Outside, all of you. No talking. Straight up the face of the hill and then cut across. That's best, eh, Bentall?"

"That's best." I stuck the note into my shirt pocket, stood to one side to let the others file quietly out. I peered at Fleck. "What you got there?"

"A rifle." He turned and spoke softly, and two men came round the corner of the blockhouse, dragging a third. "LeClerc had a man on guard. Gun belongs to him. Everybody out? All right, Krishna, inside with him."

"Dead?"

"I don't think so." Fleck didn't sound worried one way or the other. There came the sound of something heavy being dumped unceremoniously on the concrete floor inside and the two Indians came out. Fleck pulled the door quietly to and locked it.

"Come on, come on," Griffiths whispered impatiently. "Time we were off."

"You go off," I said. "I'm going to get Miss Hopeman out of the armoury."

He was already ten feet away, but he stopped, turned and came back to me.

"Are you mad?" he said. "Fleck said there's no key. That moon comes out any minute now. You'll be bound to be seen. You won't have a chance. Come on and don't be so damned stupid."

"I'll take the chance. Leave me."

"You know you're almost certain to be seen," Griffiths said softly. "If you're out they'll know we're all out. They will know that there's only one place we could go. We have women with us, it's a mile and a half to that cave entrance, we would be bound to be intercepted and cut off. What it amounts to, Bentall, is that you are prepared to risk the almost certain loss of all our lives on the selfish one in a thousand chance of doing something for Miss Hopeman. Is that it, Bentall? Is that how selfish you are?"

"I'm selfish all right," I said at last. "But I'm not all that bad, I just hadn't thought of it. I come with you to the point where there is no further possibility of interception. Then I turn back. Don't make the mistake of trying to stop me."

"You're quite crazy, Bentall." There was anger and worry both in Griffith's voice. "All you'll do is lose your life, and lose it to no purpose."

"It's my life."

We moved straight towards the face of the hill, all in a closely bunched group. No one talked, not even in whispers, though LeClerc and his men were then well over half a mile away. After we'd gone about three hundred yards the hill started to rise steeply. We'd made as much offing as we could so now we turned south and began to skirt the base of the mountain. This was where things began to become dangerous, we had to pass by the hangar and the buildings to get to the cave entrance, and just behind the hangar a sharp spur of the mountain rose above the surrounding level and would force us to come within two hundred yards of where LeClerc and his men were working.

Things went well in the first ten minutes, the moon stayed behind the cloud longer than we had any right to hope, but it wasn't going to stay there all night, eighty per cent of the sky was quite free from cloud and in those latitudes even the starlight was a factor to be reckoned with. I touched Griffiths on the arm.

"Moon's coming out any second now. There's a slight fold in the mountain about a hundred yards further on. If we hurry we might make it."

We made it, just as the moon broke through, bathing the mountain and the plain below in a harsh white glare. But we were safe, for the moment at least, the ridge that blocked us off from the view of the hangar was only three feet high, but it was enough--Heck and his two Indians, I could now see, were dressed in clothes that were completely sodden. I looked at him and said: "Did you have to take a bath before you came?"

"Damn guard sat on the pier all night with a rifle in his hands," Fleck growled. "Checking us, checking to see we didn't go near the radio. We had to slip over the far side, about one o'clock when the moon went in, and swim for it, maybe a quarter mile along the beach. Henry and the boy, of course, went the other way." I had asked that Henry would make straight for the cave, hurry through the chamber that had served as an armoury and bring back amatol blocks, primers, RDX, chemical fuses, anything he could find. If they were still there, that was: there would certainly be neither arms nor ammunition left now, and though the explosives would be a poor substitute for arms at least they would be better than nothing.

"Getting the keys was dicey," Fleck went on, "and there were only the two-the inner and outer blockhouse doors. Then we tried to force the door and window on the armoury to get Miss Hopeman out. It was hopeless." He paused. "I don't feel so good about that, Bentall. But we tried, honest to God, we tried. But we couldn't make a noise, you understand that."