It didn’t last long, fortunately. I felt the grip slowly easing, saw the beam of the lantern shifting, and she was saying in an abnormally matter-of-fact voice: “There they are.”
I turned round and there, not ten feet away, they were indeed. Three coffins—Carreras had already removed the cases—and securely stowed between baffle and bulkhead and padded with tarpaulins, so that they could come to no harm. As Tony Carreras kept on repeating, his old man didn’t miss much. Dark shiny coffins with black-braided ropes and brass handles: one of them had an inlet plaque on the lid, copper or brass, I couldn’t be sure.
“That saves me some trouble.” My voice was almost back to normal. I took the hammer and chisel I’d borrowed from the bosun’s store and let them drop. “This screwdriver will be all I need. We’ll find two of those with what’s normally inside them. Give me the lantern and stay there. I’ll be as quick as I can.”
“You’ll be quicker if I hold the lantern,” Her voice matched my own in steadiness but the pulse in her throat was going like a trip-hammer. “Hurry, please.”
I was in no way to argue. I caught the foot of the nearest coffin and pulled it towards me so that I could have room to work. It was jammed. I slid my hand under the end to lift it and suddenly my finger found a hole in the bottom of the coffin. And then another. And a third. A lead-lined coffin with holes bored in the bottom of it. That was curious, to say the least.
When I’d moved it far enough out, I started on the screws. They were brass and very heavy, but so was the screwdriver I’d taken from MacDonald’s store. And at the back of my mind was the thought that if the knock-out drops Dr Marston had provided for the sentry were in any way ineffective as the anæsthetic he had given me, then the sentry would be waking up any minute now. If he hadn’t already come to. I had that coffin lid off in no time at all.
Beneath the lid was not the satin shroud or silks I would have expected, but a filthy old blanket. In the generalissimo’s country, perhaps, their customs with coffins were different from ours. I pulled of the blanket and found I was right. Their customs were on occasion, different. The corpse, in this case consisted of blocks of amatol—each block was clearly marked with the word, so there was no mistake about it—a primer, a small case of detonators and a compact square box with wires leading from it, a timing device probably.
Susan was peering over my shoulder. “What’s amatol?”
“High explosive. Enough here to blow the Campari apart.”
She asked nothing else. I replaced the blanket, screwed on the lid and started on the next coffin. This too, had holes in the under side, probably to prevent the explosive sweating. I removed the lid, looked at the contents and replaced the lid. Number two was a duplicate of number one. And then I started on the third one. The one with the plaque. This would be the one. The plaque was heart-shaped and read with impressive simplicity: “Richard Hoskins. Senator.” Just that. Senator of what I didn’t know. But impressive. Impressive enough to ensure its reverent transportation to the United States. I removed the lid with care, gentleness and as much respectful reverence as if Richard Hoskins actually were inside, which I knew he wasn’t.
Whatever lay inside was covered with a rug. I lifted the rug gingerly, Susan brought the lantern nearer, and there it lay, cushioned in blankets and cotton wool. A polished aluminium cylinder, 75 inches in length, 11 inches in diameter, with a whitish pyroceram nose-cap. Just lying there, there was something frightening about it, something unutterably evil: but perhaps that was just because of what was in my own mind.
“What is it?” Susan’s voice was so low that she had to come closer to repeat the words. “Oh, Johnny, what in the world is it?”
“The Twister.”
“The—the what?”
“The Twister.”
“Oh, dear God!” She had it now. “This—this atomic device that was stolen in South Carolina. The Twister.” She rose unsteadily to her feet and backed away. “The Twister!”
“It won’t bite you,” I said. I didn’t feel too sure about that either. “The equivalent of five thousand tons of TNT. Guaranteed to blast any ship on earth into smithereens, if not actually vapories. And that’s just what Carreras intends to do.”
“I—I don’t understand.” Maybe she was referring to the actual hearing of the words—our talk was continually being punctuated by the screeching of metal and the sounds of wood being crushed and snapped—or to the meaning of what I was saying. “You—when he gets the gold from the Ticonderoga and trans-ships it to this vessel he has standing by, he’s going to blow up the Campari—with this?”
“There is no ship standing by. There never was. When he’s loaded the gold aboard, the kindhearted Miguel Carreras is going to free all the passengers and crew of the Campari and let them sail off in the Fort Ticonderoga. As a further mark of his sentimentality and kindness he’s going to ask Senator Hoskins here and his two presumably illustrious companions to be taken back for burial in their native land. The captain of the Ticonderoga would never dream of refusing—and, if it came to the bit, Carreras would make certain that he damn’ well didn’t refuse. See that?” I pointed to a panel near the tail of the Twister.
“Don’t touch it!” If you can imagine anyone screaming in a whisper, then that’s what she did.
“I wouldn’t touch it for all the money in the Ticonderoga,” I assured her fervently. “I’m even scared to look at the damn’ thing. Anyway, that panel is almost certainly a timing device which will be pre-set before the coffin is trans-shipped. We sail merrily on our way, hell-bent for Norfolk, the Army, Navy, Air Force, FBI and what have you—for Carreras’s radio stooges aboard the Ticonderoga will make good and certain that the radios will be smashed and we’ll have no means of sending a message. Half an hour, an hour after leaving the Campari—an hour, at least, I should think, even Carreras wouldn’t want to be within miles of an atomic device going up—well, it would be quite a bang.”
“He’ll never do it—never.” The emphatic voice didn’t carry the slightest shred of conviction. “The man must be a fiend.”
“Grade one,” I agreed. “And don’t talk rubbish about his not doing it. Why do you think they stole the Twister and made it appear as if Dr. Slingsby Caroline had lit out with it?
“From the very beginning it was with the one and only purpose of blowing the Fort Ticonderoga to kingdom come. So that there would be no possibility of any come-back, everything hinged on the total destruction of the Ticonderoga and everyone aboard it, including passengers and crew of the Campari. Maybe Carreras’s two fake radio men could have smuggled some explosives aboard—but it would be quite impossible to smuggle enough to ensure complete destruction. Hundreds of tons of high explosives in the magazines of a British battle-cruiser blew up in the last war—but still there were survivors. He couldn’t sink it by gunfire—a couple of shots from a moderately heavy gun and the Campari’s decks would be so buckled that the guns would be useless—and even then there would be bound to be survivors. But with the Twister there will be no chances of survival. None in the world.”
“Carreras’s men,” she said slowly. “They killed the guards in the atomic research establishment.”
“What else? And then forced Dr. Caroline to drive out through the gates with themselves and the Twister in the back. The Twister was probably en route to their island, by air, inside the hour, but someone drove the brake wagon down to Savannah before abandoning it. No doubt to throw suspicion on the Campari, which they knew was leaving Savannah that morning. I’m not sure why, but I would take long odds it was because Carreras, knowing the Campari was bound for the Caribbean, was reasonably sure that she would be searched at her first port of call, giving him his opportunity to introduce his bogus Marconi-man aboard.”
While I had been talking I’d been studying two circular dials inset in the panel on the Twister. Now I spread the rug back in position with all the loving care of a father smoothing out the bedcover over his youngest son and star
ted to screw the coffin lid back in position. For a time Susan watched me in silence, then said wonderingly: “Mr. Cerdan. Dr. Caroline. The same person. It has to be the same person. I remember now. At the time of the disappearance of the Twister it was mentioned that only one or two people so far know how to arm the Twister.”
“He was just as important to their plans as the Twister. Without him, it was useless. Poor old Doc Caroline has had a rough passage, I’m afraid. Not only kidnapped and forced to do as ordered, but knocked about by us also, the only people who could have saved him. Under constant guard by those two thugs disguised as nurses. He bawled me out of his cabin first time I saw him, but only because he knew that his devoted nurse, sitting beside him with her dear little knitting bag on her lap, had a sub-machine-gun inside it.”
“But—but why the wheel-chair? Was it necessary to take such elaborate——”
“Of course it was. They couldn’t have him mingling with the passengers, communicating with them. It helped conceal his unusual height. And it also gave them a perfect reason to keep a non-stop radio watch on incoming messages. He came to your father’s cocktail party because he was told to—the coup was planned for that evening and it suited Carreras to have his two armed nurses there to help in the take-over. Poor old Caroline. That dive he tried to make from his wheel-chair when I showed him the earphones wasn’t made with the intention of getting at me at all: He was trying to get at the nurse with the sub-machine-gun, but Captain Bullen didn’t know that, so he laid him out.” I tightened the last of the screws and said: “Don’t breathe a word of this back in the sick-bay—the old man talks non-stop in his sleep—or anywhere else. Not even to your parents. Come on. That sentry may come to any minute.”
“You—you’re going to leave that thing here?” She stared at me in disbelief. “You must get rid of it—you must!”
“How? Carry it up a vertical ladder over my shoulder. That thing weighs about 350 lb. altogether, including the coffin. And what happens if I do get rid of it? Carreras finds out within hours. Whether or not he finds out or guesses who took it doesn’t matter: what does matter is that he’ll know he can no longer depend on the Twister to get rid of all the inconvenient witnesses on the Campari. What then? My guess is that not one member of the crew or passengers will have more than a few hours to live. He would have to kill us then—no question of trans-shipping us to the Ticonderoga. As for the Ticonderoga, he would have to board it, kill all the crew and open the seacocks. That might take hours and would inconvenience him dangerously, might wreck all his plans. But he would have to do it. The point is that getting rid of the Twister is not going to save any lives at all, all it would accomplish is the certain death of all of us.”
“What are we going to do?” Her voice was strained and shaky, her face a pale blur in the reflected light. “Oh, Johnny, what are we going to do?”
“I’m going back to bed.” Heaven only knew I felt like it. “Then I’ll waste my time trying to figure out how to save Dr. Caroline.”
“Dr. Caroline? I don’t see—why Dr. Caroline?”
“Because he’s number one for the high-jump, as things stand. Long before the rest of us. Because he’s the man who’s going to arm the Twister,” I said patiently. “Do you think they’ll transfer him to the Ticonderoga and let him acquaint the captain with the fact that the coffin he’s taking back to the states contains not Senator Hoskins but an armed and ticking atom bomb?”
“Where’s it all going to end?” There was panic, open panic in her voice now, a near hysteria. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. It’s like some dark nightmare.” She had her hands twisted in my lapels, her face buried in my jacket—well, anyway, her old man’s jacket—and her voice was muffled. “Oh, Johnny, where’s it all going to end?”
“A touching scene, a most touching scene,” a mocking voice said from close behind me. “It all ends here and now. This moment.”
I whirled round, or at least I tried to whirl round, but I couldn’t even do that properly. What with disengaging Susan’s grip, the weakness of my leg, and the lurching of the ship, the sudden turn threw me completely off balance and I stumbled and fell against the ship’s side. A powerful light switched on, blinding me, and in black silhouette against the light I could see the snub barrel of an automatic.
“On your feet, Carter.” There was no mistaking the voice. Tony Carreras’s, no longer pleasant and affable, but cold, hard, vicious, the real Tony Carreras at last. “I want to see you fall when this slug hits you. Clever-clever Carter. Or so you thought. On your feet, I said! Or you’d rather take it lying there? Suit yourself.”
The gun lifted a trifle. The direct no-nonsense type, he didn’t believe in fancy farewell speeches. Shoot them and be done with it. I could believe now that he was his father’s son. My bad leg was under me and I couldn’t get up. I stared into the beam of light, into the black muzzle of the gun. I stopped breathing and tensed myself. Tensing yourself against a .38 fired from a distance of five feet is a great help but I wasn’t feeling very logical at the moment.
“Don’t shoot!” Susan screamed. “Don’t kill him or we’ll all die.”
The torch beam wavered, then steadied again. It steadied on me. And the gun hadn’t shifted any that I could see.
Susan took a couple of steps towards him, but he fended her off, stiff-armed.
“Out of my way, lady.” I’d never in my life heard such concentrated venom and malignance. I’d misjudged young Carreras all right. And her words hadn’t even begun to register on him, so implacable was his intention. I still wasn’t breathing and my mouth was dry as a kiln.
“The Twister!” Her voice was urgent, compelling, desperate. “He armed the Twister!”
“What! What are you saying?” This time she had got through. “The Twister? Armed?” The voice malignant as ever, but I thought I detected overtones of fear.
“Yes, Carreras, armed!” I’d never known before how important lubrication of the throat and mouth was to the human voice, a buzzard with tonsilitis had nothing on my croak. “Armed, Carreras, armed!” The repetition was not for emphasis. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, how to carry this off, how to exploit the few seconds’ grace Susan had brought from me. I shifted the hand that was propping me up, the one in the black shadow behind me, as if to brace myself against the pitching of the Campari. My fingers closed over the handle of the hammer I’d dropped. I wondered bleakly what I was going to do with it. The torch and gun were steady as ever.
“You’re lying, Carter.” The confidence was back in his voice. “God knows how you found out about it, but you’re lying: you don’t know how to arm it.”
That was it: keep him talking, just keep him talking.
“I don’t. But Dr. Slingsby Caroline does.”
That shook him, literally. The torch wavered. But it didn’t waver enough.
“How do you know about Dr. Caroline?” he demanded hoarsely. His voice was almost a shout. “How do you——”
“I was speaking to him tonight,” I said calmly.
“Speaking with him! But—there’s a key to arm this. The only key to arm it. And my father has it.”
“Dr. Caroline has a spare. In his tobacco pouch. You never thought to look, did you, Carreras?” I sneered.
“You’re lying,” he repeated mechanically. Then, more strongly: “Lying, I say, Carter! I saw you tonight. I saw you leave the sick bay—my God, do you think I was so stupid as not to get suspicious when I saw the sentry drinking coffee given him by kind-hearted Carter—locked it up, followed you to the radio office and then down to Caroline’s cabin. But you never went inside, Carter. I lost you then for a few minutes, I admit. But you never went inside.”
“Why didn’t you stop us earlier?”
“Because I wanted to find out what you were up to. I found it.”
“So he’s the person we thought we saw!” I said to Susan. The conviction in my voice astonished even myself. “You poor fool, we notice
d something in the shadows and left in a hurry. But we went back, Carreras, oh, yes, we went back. To Dr. Caroline. And we didn’t waste any time talking to him, either. We had a far smarter idea than that. Miss Beresford wasn’t quite accurate. I didn’t arm the Twister. Dr. Caroline himself did that.” I smiled and shifted my eyes from the beam of the torch to a spot behind and to the right of Carreras. “Tell him Doctor.”
Carreras half turned, cursed viciously, swung back. His mind was fast, his reactions faster, he’d hardly even begun to fall for the old gag. All he allowed us was a second of time and in that brief moment I hadn’t even got past tightening my grip on the hammer. And now he was going to kill me.
But he couldn’t get his gun lined up. Susan had been waiting for the chance, she sensed I’d been building up towards the chance, she dropped her lantern and flung herself forward even as Carreras started to turn and she had only about three feet to go. Now she was clinging desperately to his gun arm, all her weight on it, forcing it down towards the floor. I twisted myself convulsively forward and that two-pound hammer came arching over my shoulder and flew straight for Carreras’s face with all the power, all the hatred and viciousness that was in me.
He saw it coming. His left hand, still gripping the torch, was raised high to smash down on the unprotected nape of Susan’s neck. He jerked his head sideways, flung out his left arm in instinctive reaction: the hammer caught him just below the left elbow with tremendous force, his torch went flying through the air and the hold was plunged into absolute darkness. Where the hammer went I don’t know: a heavy crate screeched and rumbled across the floor just at that moment and I never heard it land.
The crate ground to a standstill. In the sudden momentary silence I could hear the sound of struggling, of heavy breathing. I was slow in getting to my feet, my left leg was practically useless, but maybe it only seemed slow to me. Fear, when it is strong enough, has the curious effect of slowing up time. And I was afraid. I was afraid for Susan. Carreras, except as the source of menace to her, didn’t exist for me at that moment. Only Susan: he was a big man, a powerful man, he could break her neck with a single wrench, kill her with a single blow.
The Golden Rendezvous Page 19
