The Dark Crusader (8 page)

"One or two."

"Leave one out, please."

"Right." She hesitated. "I don't know much about boats but I think this one has changed course once or twice in the past hour."

"How do you figure that out?" Old sea-dog Bentall, very tolerant to the landlubbers.

"We're not rolling any more, are we? The waves are passing under us from the stern. And it's the second or third change I've noticed."

She was right, the swell had died down considerably but what little was left was from aft. But I paid small attention to this, I knew the trades died away at night and local currents could set up all kinds of cross-motions in the water. It didn't seem worth worrying about. She went away and I pressed close to the deckhead.

All I could hear at first was a violently loud tinny rattling against the ventilator, a rattling that grew more violent and persistent with every second that passed. Rain, and very heavy rain at that: it sounded like rain that meant to keep going on for a long time. Both Fleck and I would be happy about that.

And then I heard Fleck's voice. First the patter of hurrying footsteps, then his voice. I guessed that he was standing just inside the doorway of the wireless cabin.

"Time you got your earphones on, Henry." The voice had a reverberating and queerly metallic timbre from its passage down the funnel-shaped ventilator, but was perfectly plain. "Just on schedule."

"Six minutes yet, boss." Henry, seated at the radio table, must have been five feet away from Fleck, yet his voice was hardly less distinct: the ventilator's amplifying effects were as good as that.

"Doesn't matter. Tune in."

I strained my ear against that ventilator until it seemed to me that I was about halfway up it, but I heard nothing further. After a couple of minutes I felt a tug at my sleeve.

"All done," she said in a low voice. "Here's the torch."

"Right." I jumped down, helped her up and murmured: "For heaven's sake don't move from there. Our friend Henry's listening in for the final word right now."

I had little enough left to do and three or four minutes saw me all through. I stuffed a blanket inside the cellophane bag and tied the neck securely: that made me the complete optimist. There were an awful lot of 'its' attached to that blanket. If we managed to break open the hatch, if we managed to get off the schooner without too many bullet holes in us, if we didn't subsequently drown, if we weren't eaten alive by sharks or barracuda or whatever else took a fancy to us during the hours of darkness, if that island were far away from our jumping-off point or, worse, didn't exist at all, then it seemed like a good idea to have a water-soaked blanket to ward off sunstroke. But I didn't want to have to cope with its waterlogged dead weight during the night: hence the cellophane bag. I tied the bag on to one of the drums and had just finished stowing some clothes and cigarettes inside the same drum when Marie came aft and stood beside me.

She said without preamble and in a quiet still voice, not scared: "They don't need us any more."

"Well, at least all my preparations haven't been wasted. They discussed it?"

"Yes. They might have been discussing the weather: I think you're wrong about Fleck, he's not worried about doing away with anyone. From the way he talked it was just an interesting problem. Henry asked him how they were going to get rid of us and Fleck said: 'Let's do it nice and quiet and civilized. We'll tell them that the boss has changed his mind. We'll tell them they're to be delivered to him as soon as possible. We'll forget and forgive, we'll take them up to the cabin for a drink, slip them the knockout drops then ease them soft and gently over the side.'"

"A charming fellow. We drown peacefully and even if we do wash up somewhere there'll be no bullet holes to start people asking questions."

"But a post-mortem can always show the presence of poison or narcotics-"

"Any post-mortem carried out on us," I interrupted heavily, "could be made without the doctor taking his hands from his pockets. If there are no broken bones you can't determine anything about the cause of death from a couple of nice clean shiny skeletons which would be all that was left after the denizens of the deep had finished with us. Or maybe the sharks eat bones, too: I wouldn't know."

"Do you have to talk like that?" she asked coldly.

"I'm only trying to cheer myself up." I handed her a couple of lifebelts. "Adjust the shoulder straps so that you can wear them both round your waist, one above the other. Be careful that you don't strike the CO2 release accidentally. Wait till you are in the water before you inflate." I was already shrugging into my own harness. She appeared to be taking her time about adjusting the straps so I said: "Please hurry."

"There is no hurry," she said. "Henry said 'I suppose we'll have to wait a couple of hours before we do anything' and Fleck said, 'Yes, that at least.' Maybe they're going to wait until it gets really dark."

"Or maybe they don't want the crew to see anything. The reasons don't matter. What does matter is that the two-hour delay refers to the time when they intend ditching us. Maybe there
is
an island and they want to get well past it in case we should be washed up there before the sharks get to us. They could come for us any time. And you're overlooking the fact that when they do discover we're missing the first thing they'll do is to back-track and search. I don't much fancy being run down by a schooner or chopped to pieces by a propeller blade or just used for a little target practice. The sooner we're gone the less chance we have of being picked up when they do discover we're missing."

"I hadn't thought of that," she admitted.

"It's like the colonel told you," I said. "Bentall thinks of everything."

She didn't think that worth any comment so we finished fixing the lifebelts in silence. I gave her the torch and asked her to hold it in position while I climbed up the ladder with the bottle-screw and two hardwood battens and set about opening the hatch. I placed one of the hardwood battens on the top rung, set one end of the bottle-screw on the wood directly above the rung and unscrewed the upper eyebolt until it was firmly against the other batten which I'd placed under the hatch, to spread the load. I could hear the rain drumming furiously on the hatch and shivered involuntarily at the prospect of the imminent soaking, which was pretty silly when I came to consider just how much wetter I would be a few seconds later.

Forcing that hatch-cover was easy. Either the wood of the cover was old and dry or the screws holding the bolt in position were rusted for I'd only given the central shank of the bottle-screw half-a-dozen turns, the counter-threaded eye-bolts steadily forcing themselves further apart, when I heard the first creak of the wood beginning to give way and splinter. Another half-dozen turns and suddenly all resistance to my turning had ceased. The bolt had come clear of its moorings and the way out was clear-if, that was to say, Fleck and his friends weren't standing there patiently waiting to blow my head off as soon as it appeared above the level of the hatch. There was only one way to find that out, it didn't appeal much but at least it was logical. I would stick my head out and see what happened to it.

I handed down the battens and bottle-screw, checked that the two water drums were conveniently to hand, softly told Marie to switch off the torch, eased the hatch-cover open a few inches and cautiously felt for the bolt. It was just where it ought to have been, lying loose on top of the hatch-cover. I lowered it gently to the deck, bent my back as I took another two steps up the ladder, hooked my fingers over the edge of the hatch-cover and straightened both back and arm in one movement so that the hinged cover swung vertically open and my head was suddenly two feet above deck level. A jack-in-the-box couldn't have done any better. Nobody shot me.

Nobody shot me because there was nobody there to shoot me, and mere was nobody there to shoot me because no one but a very special type of moron would have ventured out on that deck without an absolutely compelling reason. Even then he would have required a suit of armour. If you were willing to stand at the bottom of Niagara Falls and say to yourself that it was only raining, then you could have said it was raining that night. If anyone ever gets around to inventing a machine gun that fires water instead of bullets I'll know exactly what it will be like at the receiving end. Enormous cold drops of water, so close together as to be almost a solid wall, lashed the schooner with a ferocity and intensity I would not have believed possible. The decks were a welter of white seething foam as those cannonball giant drops disintegrated on impact and rebounded high into the air, while the sheer physical weight, the pitiless savagery of that torrential rain drumming on your bent back was nothing short of terrifying. Within five seconds I was literally soaked to the skin. I had to fight the almost overwhelming impulse to pull that cover shut over my head and retreat to the haven of that suddenly warm and dry and infinitely desirable hold. But then I thought of Fleck and his knock-out drops and of a couple of nice new shiny skeletons on the floor of the sea, and I had the hatch-cover fully back and was on deck, calling softly for the water drums, before I was properly aware of what I was doing.

Fifteen seconds later Marie and the two drums were on deck and I was lowering the hatch-cover back into position and placing the bolt in approximately the original position in case someone did venture out later on a tour of inspection.

With the darkness and blinding rain visibility didn't exceed a few feet and we felt rather than saw our way to the stern of the schooner. I leaned far over the rail on the port counter to try to establish the position of the screw, for although the schooner was making hardly any more than three knots now-I supposed the lack of visibility must have forced Fleck to reduce speed-even so, that screw could still chop us up pretty badly. At least that.

At first I could see nothing, just a sea surface that was no longer that but a churned and hissing expanse of milky white froth, but my eyes were gradually becoming more adjusted to the darkness and after a minute or so I could clearly make out the smooth black water in the rain-free shelter under the long overhang of the schooner's stern. Not quite black-it was black flecked with the sparkling iridescence of phosphorus, and it wasn't long before I traced the area of maximum turbulence that gave rise to the phosphorescence. That was where the screw was-and it was far enough forward to let us drop off over the stern-post without any fear of being sucked into the vortex of the screw.

Marie went first. She held a water drum in one hand while I lowered her by the other until she was half-submerged in the water. Then I let go. Five seconds later I was in the water myself.

No one heard us go, no one saw us go. And we didn't see Fleck and his schooner go. He wasn't using his steaming lights that night. With the line of business he was in, he'd probably forgotten where the switch was.

CHAPTER THREE

Tuesday 7 P.M.-Wednesday 9 A.M.

After the numbing stinging cold of that torrential rain the water in the sea was almost blissfully warm. There were no waves, any that dared show their heads were beaten flat by that deluge, and what little swell there was was long enough to be no more than a gentle undulation on the surface of the sea. The wind still seemed to be from the east: that was if my assumption that the schooner had still been travelling south had been correct.

For the first thirty seconds or so I couldn't see Marie. I knew she could be only yards away but the rain bouncing off the water raised so dense and impenetrable a curtain that nothing at sea level could be seen through its milky opacity. I shouted, twice, but there was no reply. I took half-a-dozen strokes, towing the can behind me, and literally bumped into her. She was coughing and spluttering as if she had swallowed some water, but she still retained hold of her water drum and seemed otherwise unharmed. She was high in the water so she must at least have remembered to operate the CO2 release switch on her lifebelt.

I put my head close to hers and said: "All right?"

"Yes." She coughed some more and said: "My face and neck. That rain-they feel cut."

It was too dark to see whether her face was, in fact, cut. But I could believe it, my own face felt as if it had blundered into a wasp's nest. Black mark for Bentall. The first and most obvious thing that I should have done after opening that hatch and feeling the lash of that cannonading rain should have been to dig some of the left-over clothes out of our suitcases and wrap them round our heads, bandanna-fashion. But too late for tears now. I reached for the plastic bag attached to my drum, ripped it open and spread the blanket over our heads. We could still feel the impact of that rain like a shower of huge hailstones but at least our skins were no longer exposed. It was better than nothing.

When I'd finished arranging it Marie said: "What do we do now? Stay here in our tent or start swimming?"

I passed up all the obvious remarks about wondering whether we should swim for Australia or South America, they didn't even begin to seem funny in the circumstances, and said: "I think we should try to move away from here. If this rain keeps up Fleck will never find us. But there's no guarantee that it will last. We might as well swim west, that's the way the wind and the swell are running, it's roughly the direction in which the island would lie if Fleck hasn't altered course too much, and it's easiest for us."

"Isn't that the way Fleck would think, and move to the west looking for us?"

"If he thinks we're only half as twisted as he is himself, he'll probably figure we've gone in the other direction. Heads you win, tails you lose. Come on."

We made poor speed. As she'd said, she was no shakes as a swimmer, and those two drums and the soggy heavy blanket didn't help us much, but we did cover a fair bit of ground in the first hour, swimming for ten minutes, resting for five. If it hadn't been for the thought that we could do this sort of thing for the next month and still not arrive anywhere, it would have been quite pleasant: the sea was still warm, the rain was beginning to ease and the sharks stayed to home.