The Golden Rendezvous

by Alistair MacLean

  “But—I mean, Captain, what part can an old cripple like Mr. Cerdan have in all this?”

  “According to Mr. Carter, Cerdan isn’t old at all—he’s just made up to look old. And also according to Mr. Carter, if Cerdan is a cripple, paralysed from the waist down as he is supposed to be, then you’re going to witness a modern miracle of healing just as soon as he recovers consciousness. For all we know, Cerdan is very probably the leader of this bunch of murderers. We don’t know.”

  “But what in God’s name is behind it all?” Beresford demanded.

  “That’s just what we are about to find out,” Bullen said tightly. He glanced at Carreras, father and son. “Come here, you two.”

  They came, MacDonald and Tommy Wilson following: Carreras Senior had a handkerchief wrapped round his shattered hand trying, not very successfully, to stem the flow of blood, and the eyes that caught mine were wicked with hate: Tony Carreras on the other hand, seemed calmly unconcerned, even slightly amused. I made a mental note to keep a very close eye indeed on Tony Carreras. He was calm and relaxed by half.

  They halted a few feet away. Bullen said: “Mr. Wilson.”

  “Sir?”

  “That sawn-off shotgun belonging to our late friend here. Pick it up.”

  Wilson picked it up.

  “Do you think you could use it? And don’t point the damned thing at me,” he added hastily.

  “I think so, sir.”

  “Cerdan and that so-called nurse. A sharp eye on them. If they come to try anything——” Bullen left the sentence unfinished. “Mr. Carter, Carreras and his son may be armed.”

  “Yes, sir.” I moved round behind Tony Carreras. careful to keep out of the line of fire of both Bullen and MacDonald, caught his jacket by the collar and jerked it savagely down over shoulders and arms till it reached the level of his elbows.

  “You seem to have done this sort of thing before, Mr. Carter,” Tony Carreras said easily. He was a cool customer all right, too damned cool for my liking.

  “Television,” I explained. He was carrying a gun, under the left shoulder. He was wearing a specially made shirt with a couple of hemmed slips front and back on the left-hand side so that the chest strap for the holster was concealed under the shirt. Tony Carreras was very thorough in his preparations.

  I went over his clothes, but he’d only the one gun. I went through the same routine with Miguel Carreras, he wasn’t anywhere near as affable as his son, but maybe his hand was hurting him. He wasn’t carrying any gun. And maybe that made Miguel Carreras the boss: maybe he didn’t have to carry any gun, maybe he was in a position to order other people to do his killing for him.

  “Thank you,” Captain Bullen said. “Mr. Carreras, we will be in Nassau in a few hours’ time. The police will be aboard by midnight. Do you wish to make a statement now or would you rather make it to the police?”

  “My hand is broken.” Miguel Carreras’s voice was a harsh whisper. “The forefinger is smashed, it will have to be amputated. Someone is going to pay for this.”

  “I take it that is your answer,” Bullen said calmly. “Very well. Bo’sun, four heaving lines, if you please. I want those men trussed like turkeys.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” The bo’sun took one step forward, then stood stockstill. Through the open doorway had come a flat staccato burst of sound—the unmistakable chattering of a machine-gun. It seemed to come from almost directly above, from the bridge. And then all the lights went out.

  I think I was the first person to move. I think I was the only person to move. I took a long step forward, hooked my left arm round Tony Carreras’s neck, rammed the Colt into the small of his back and said softly: “Don’t even think of trying anything, Carreras.”

  And then there was silence again. It seemed to go on and on and on, but it probably didn’t last more than a few seconds altogether. A woman screamed, a brief choking sound that died away into a moan, and then there was silence once more, a silence that ended abruptly with a violent crashing, splintering and tinkling as heavy solid metallic objects, operating in almost perfect unison, smashed in the plate-glass windows that gave to the deck outside: at the same instant there came a sharp echoing crash of metal against metal as the door was kicked wide open to smash back against the bulkhead.

  “Drop your guns, all of you,” Miguel Carreras called in a high, clear voice. “Drop them—now! Unless you want a massacre.”

  The lights came on.

  Vaguely outlined against the four smashed windows of the drawing-room I could see the blurs of four indistinct heads and shoulders and arms. The blurs I didn’t care about, it was what they held in their arms that worried me—the wicked-looking snouts and cylindrical magazines of four sub-machine-guns. A fifth man, dressed in jungle green and wearing a green beret on his head, stood in the doorway, a similar automatic carbine cradled in his hands.

  I could see what Carreras meant by dropping our guns. It seemed an excellent idea to me, we had about as much chance as the last ice-cream at a children’s party. I was already starting to loosen my grip on the gun when, incredulously, I saw Captain Bullen jerk up his Colt on the armed man in the doorway. It was criminal, suicidal folly, either he was acting completely instinctively, without any thought at all, or the bitter chargin, the killing disappointment after having thought that he had held all the cards in his hands, had been too much for him. I might have known, I thought briefly and wildly, he’d been far too calm and self-controlled, the safety valve screwed down on the bursting boiler.

  I tried to shout out a warning, but it was too late, it was far too late. I shoved Tony Carreras violently aside and tried to reach Bullen, to strike down his gun-hand, but I was still far too late, a lifetime too late. The heavy Colt was roaring and bucking in Bullen’s hand, and the man in the doorway, to whom the ridiculous idea of resistance must have been the very last thought in his head, let the machine-gun slide slowly out of his lifeless hands and toppled backwards out of sight.

  The man outside the window nearest the door had his machine-gun lined up on the captain. Bullen, in that second, was the biggest fool in the world, a crazy suicidal maniac, but even so I couldn’t let him be gunned down where he stood. I don’t know where my first bullet went but the second must have struck the machine-gun, I saw it jerk violently as if struck by a giant hand, and then came a continuous cacophonous drumfire of deafening sound as a third man squeezed the trigger of his machine-gun and kept on squeezing it. Something with the power and weight of a plunging pile-driver smashed into my left thigh, hurling me back against the bar. My head struck the heavy brass rail at the foot of the counter and the sound of the drumfire died away.

  The stink of drifting cordite and the silence of the grave. Even before consciousness came fully back to me, even before I opened my eyes, I was aware of those, of the cordite and the unearthly stillness. I opened my eyes slowly, pushed myself shakily up till I was sitting with my back more or less straight against the bar, and shook my head to try to clear it. I had, understandably enough, forgotten about my stiff neck: the sharp stab of pain did more to clear my head than anything else could have done.

  The first thing I was aware of was the passengers. They were all stretched out on the carpet, lying very still. For one heart-stopping moment I thought they were all dead or dying, mown down in swathes by that stuttering machine-gun, then I saw Mr. Greenstreet, Miss Harrbride’s husband, move his head slightly and look around the drawing-room with a cautious and terrified eye. One eye was all I could see. At any other time it would have been very, very funny: but I never felt less like laughing. The passengers, perhaps through wisdom but more probably through the reflex reaction of instinctive self-preservation, must have flung themselves to the deck the moment the machine-gun had opened up and were only now daring to lift their heads. I concluded that I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few seconds.

  I moved my eyes to the right. Carreras and son were standing just where they had been and Tony Carreras had
a gun in his hand now. My gun. Beyond them, a huddled group lay sprawling or sitting on the floor: Cerdan, the “nurse” I’d shot and three others.

  Tommy Wilson, the laughing, lovable happy-go-lucky Tommy Wilson, was dead. He wouldn’t have to worry about his mathematics any more.

  It didn’t need old Doc Marston and his shortsighted peering to tell me that Wilson was dead. He was lying on his back and it looked to me as if half his chest had been shot away, he must have taken the main brunt of that concentrated burst of machine-gun fire. And Tommy hadn’t even lifted his gun.

  Archie MacDonald was stretched out on his side, close to Wilson. He seemed to me to be very still, far, far too still. I couldn’t see the front of his body for he was turned away from me, for all I knew machine-gun slugs had torn the life out of him as they had out of Tommy Wilson. But I could see blood all over his face and neck, slowly soaking into the carpet.

  Captain Bullen was the one who was sitting. He wasn’t dead anyway, but I wouldn’t have bet a brass farthing on his chances of staying alive. He was fully conscious, his mouth warped and dragged into an unnatural smile, his face white and twisted with pain. From shoulder almost to the waist his right side was soaked in blood, so soaked that I couldn’t see where the bullets had gone home: but I could see bright red bubbles flecking the twisted lips, which meant that he had been shot through the lung.

  I looked at the three of them again. Bullen, MacDonald, Wilson. Three better men it would have been hard to find, three better shipmates impossible to find. They had wanted none of this, none of this blood and agony and death, all they had wanted was the chance to do their jobs in peace and quiet as best they could. Hard-working, companionable and infinitely decent men, they had sought no violence, thought no violence, so now they lay there dead and dying. MacDonald and Bullen with their wives and families, Tommy Wilson with his fiancée in England and a girl in every port in America and the Caribbean. I looked at them and I felt no sadness or sorrow or anger or shock, I just felt cold and detached and strangely uninvolved in it all. I looked from them to the Carreras family and Cerdan and I made myself a promise, and it was well for me that neither Carreras heard my promise or knew of its irrevocable finality for they were clever, calculating men and they would have shot me dead as I lay there.

  I wasn’t feeling any pain at all but I remembered about the pile-driver that had hurled me back against the bar. I looked down at my leg, and from mid-thigh to well below the knee the trousers were so saturated with blood that there was no trace of white left. The carpet all around my leg was soaked in it. That carpet I remembered vaguely, had cost over £10,000, and it was certainly taking a terrific beating that night. Lord Dexter would have been furious. I looked at my leg again and fingered the soggy material. Three distinct tears, which meant I had been shot three times. I supposed the pain would come later. A great deal of blood, far too much blood: I wondered if an artery had been torn.

  “Ladies and gentlemen.” It was Carreras speaking, and although his hand had been giving him hell there was no sign of it in his face. The fury, the malevolence I had so recently seen, was only a memory: he was back on balance again, urbane, commanding, in complete control of the situation.”

  “I regret all this, regret it extremely.” He waved his left hand in the direction of Bullen and Wilson, MacDonald and myself. “All so unnecessary, so terribly unnecessary, brought upon Captain Bullen and his men by Captain Bullen’s reckless folly.” Most of the passengers were on their feet now, and I could see Susan Beresford standing beside her father, staring down at me as if she weren’t seeing too well, eyes abnormally large in the pale face. “I regret, too, the distress you have been caused, and to you, Mr. and Mrs. Beresford, I tender my apologies for the ruin of your night’s entertainment. Your kindness has been ill-rewarded.”

  “For God’s sake cut out the fancy speeches,” I interrupted. My voice didn’t sound like mine at all, a harsh, strained croak, a bull-frog with laryngitis. “Get the doctor for Captain Bullen. He’s been shot through the lung.”

  He looked at me speculatively, then at Bullen, then back at me.

  “A certain indestructible quality about you, Mr. Carter,” he said thoughtfully. He bent over and peered at my bloodstained leg. “Shot three times, your leg must be pretty badly smashed, yet you can observe so tiny a detail as a fleck of blood on Captain Bullen’s mouth. You are incapacitated, and I am glad: had your captain, officers and crew composed exclusively of men like yourself I would never have come within a thousand miles of the Campari. As for the doctor, he will be here soon. He is tending a man on the bridge.”

  “Jamieson? Our third officer?”

  “Mr. Jamieson is beyond all help,” he said curtly. “Like Captain Bullen, he fancied himself as a man in a heroic mould: like Captain Bullen he has paid the price for his stupidity. The man at the wheel was struck in the arm by a stray bullet.” He turned to face the passengers. “You need have no further worry about your personal safety. The Campari is now completely in my hands and will remain so: however, you form no part of my plans and will be transferred in two or three days to another vessel. Meanwhile you will all eat, live and sleep in this room: I cannot spare individual guards for each stateroom. Mattresses and blankets will be brought to you. If you co-operate, you can exist in reasonable comfort: you certainly have no more to fear.”

  “What is the meaning of this damnable outrage, Carreras?” There was a shake in Beresford’s voice. “Those desperadoes, those killers. What of them? Who are they? Where in the name of God did they come from? What do you intend to do? You’re mad, man, completely mad. Surely you know that you can’t expect to get off with this?”

  “You may use that thought for consolation. Ah, Doctor, there you are.” He held out his right hand, swathed in its bloodstained handkerchief. “Have a look at this, will you?”

  “Damn you and your hand,” Dr. Marston said bitterly. The old boy was trembling, the sight of the dead and dying must have hit him hard, but he was hopping mad for all that. “There are other more seriously injured men here, I must——”

  “You may as well realise that I, and I alone, give the orders from now on,” Carreras interrupted. “My hand. At once. Ah, Juan.” This to a tall thin swarthy man who had just entered, a rolled-up chart under his arm. “Give that to Mr. Carter here. That’s him, yes. Mr. Carter, Captain Bullen said —and I have been aware of it for many hours—that we are heading for Nassau and are due there in less than four hours. Lay off a course to take us well clear of Nassau, to the east, then out midway between the Great Abaco and Eleuthera islands and so approximately north-north-west into the North Atlantic. My own navigation has become rather rusty, I fear. Mark in the approximate times for course changes.”

  I took the chart, pencil, parallel rulers and dividers and laid the chart on my knee. Carreras said consideringly: “What, no ‘Do your own damned navigation’ or words to that effect?”

  “What’s the point?” I said wearily. “You wouldn’t hesitate to line up all the passengers and shoot them one by one if I didn’t co-operate.”

  “It’s a pleasure to deal with a man who sees and accepts the inevitable,” Carreras smiled. “But you greatly overestimate my ruthlessness. Later, Mr. Carter, when we have you fixed up you shall become a permanent installation on the bridge. It is unfortunate, but I suppose you realise that you are the only deck officer left to us?”

  “You’ll have to get some other installation on the bridge,” I said bitterly. “My thigh-bone is smashed “

  “What?” He looked at me narrowly.

  “I can feel it grating.” I twisted my face up to let him see how I could feel it grating. “Dr. Marston will soon confirm it.”

  “We can arrive at some other arrangement,” Carreras said equably. He winced as Dr. Marston probed at his hand. “The forefinger: it will have to come off?”

  “I don’t think so. A local anæsthetic, a small operation and I believe I can save it.” Carreras didn’t know the
danger he was in, if he let old Marston get to work on him he’d probably end up by losing his whole arm. “But it shall have to be done in my surgery.”

  “It’s probably time we all went to the surgery. Tony, check engine-room, radar-room, all men off duty: see that they are all safely under guard. Then take that chart to the bridge and see that the helmsman makes the proper course alterations at the proper time. See that the radar operator is kept under constant supervision and reports the slightest object on his screen: Mr. Carter here is quite capable of laying off a course which would take us smack into the middle of Eleuthera Island. Two men to take Mr. Cerdan to his cabin. Dr. Marston, is it possible to take those men down to your surgery without endangering their lives?”

  “I don’t know.” Marston finished his temporary bandaging of Carreras’s hand and crossed to Bullen. “How do you feel, Captain?”

  Bullen looked at him with lack-lustre eyes. He tried to smile but it was no more than an agonised grimace. He tried to speak but no words came, just fresh bubbles of blood at his lips. Marston produced scissors, cut the captain’s shirt open, examined him briefly and said. “We may as well risk it. Two of your men, Mr. Carreras, two strong men. See that his chest is not compressed.”

  He left Bullen, bent over MacDonald and straightened almost immediately. “This man can be moved with safety.”

  “MacDonald!” I said. “The bo’sun. He—he’s not dead?”

  “He’s been hit on the head. Creased, probably concussed, perhaps even the skull fractured: but he’ll survive. He seems to have been hit on the knee, too: nothing serious.”

  I felt as if someone had lifted the Sydney Bridge off my back. The bo’sun had been my friend, my good friend, for too many years now: and, besides, with Archie MacDonald by me all things were possible.