I stroked her hair. “Yes, Susan, I understand.” I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“It was like a dream.” I didn’t see where she came into the dream. “In the future. Away—away from this dreadful ship. And then you burst the dream and we’re back on the Campari. And no one knows what the end’s to be, except us—Mummy, Daddy, all of them, Carreras has them believing their lives will be spared.” She sobbed again, then said, between sobs: “Oh, my dear. We’re just kidding ourselves. It’s all over. Everything’s over. Forty armed men and they’re prowling all over the ship. I saw them. Double guards everywhere—there are two outside this door. And every door locked. There’s no hope, there’s no hope. Mummy, Daddy, you, me, all of us—this time tomrorrow it will all be over. Miracles don’t happen any more.”
“It’s not all over, Susan.” I’d never make a salesman, I thought drearily, if I met a man dying of thirst in the Sahara I couldn’t have convinced him that water was good for him. “It’s never all over.” But that didn’t sound any better than my first attempt.
I heard the creak of springs and saw MacDonald propped up on one elbow, thick black eyebrows raised in puzzlement and concern. The sound of her crying must have awakened him.
“It’s all right, Archie,” I said. “Just a bit upset, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry.” She straightened herself and turned her tear-stained face in the bo’sun’s direction. Her breath was coming in the quick, short, indrawn gasps that are the aftermath of crying. “I’m terribly sorry. I woke you up. But there is no hope, is there, Mr. MacDonald?”
“‘Archie’ will do for me,” the bo’sun said gravely.
“Well, Archie.” She tried to smile at him through her tears. “I’m just a terrible coward.”
“And you spending all day with your parents and never once being able to tell them what you knew? What kind of cowardice do you call that, miss?” MacDonald said reproachfully.
“You’re not answering me,” she said in tearful accusation.
“I am a West Highlander, Miss Beresford,” MacDonald said slowly. “I have the gift of my ancestors, a black gift at times that I’d rather be without, but I have it. I can see what comes tom morrow or the day after tommorrow: not often, but at times I can. You cannot will the second sight to come, but come it does. I have seen what is to come many times in the past few years, and Mr. Carter there will tell you that I have never once been wrong.” This was the first I had ever heard of it, he was as fluent a liar as myself. “Everything is going to turn out well.”
“Do you think so, do you really think so?” There was hope in her voice now, hope in her eyes, that slow, measured speech of MacDonald’s, the rock-like steadiness of the dark eyes in that sun-weathered face, bespoke a confidence, a certainty, an unshakable belief that was most impressive. There, now, I thought, was a man who would have made a great salesman.
“I don’t think, Miss Beresford.” Again the grave smile. “I know. Our troubles are almost at their end. Do what I do—put your last cent on Mr. Carter here.”
He even had me convinced. I, too, knew that everything was going to turn out just fine, until I remembered who he was depending on. Me. I gave Susan a handkerchief and said: “Go and tell Archie about that job.”
“You’re not going to trust your life to that thing?” There was horror in Susan’s face, panic in her voice as she watched me tie a bowline round my waist. “Why, it’s no thicker than my little finger.” I could hardly blame her: the thin three-stranded rope, no bigger than an ordinary clothes line, was hardly calculated to inspire confidence in anyone. It didn’t inspire much in me, even although I did know its properties.
“It’s nylon, miss,” MacDonald explained soothingly. “The very rope mountaineers use in the Himalayas—and you don’t think they’d trust their lives to anything they weren’t dead sure of? You could hang a big motor-car on the end of this and it still wouldn’t break.” Susan gave him her it’s-all-right-for-you-to-talk-it’s-not-your-life-that’s-depending-on-it look, bit her lip and said nothing.
The time was exactly midnight. If I’d read the clock dial settings on the Twister properly, six hours was the maximum delayed action that could be obtained. Assuming Carreras rendezvoused exactly on time at 5 a.m., it would be at least another hour before he could get clear: so, the Twister wouldn’t be armed until after midnight.
Everything was ready. The sick-bay door had been cautiously locked on the inside with the key I’d taken from Tony Carreras so that neither of the two guards could burst in unexpectedly in the middle of things. And even if they did get suspicious and force an entrance, MacDonald had a gun.
MacDonald himself was now sitting at the top of my bed, beside the window. Marston and I had half-carried him there from his own bed. His left leg was quite useless—like myself, he’d been given an injection by Doc Marston to deaden the pain, mine being twice as powerful as the previous night’s dose—but then MacDonald was not going to be called upon to use his leg that night, only his arms and shoulders, and there was nothing wrong with MacDonald’s arms and shoulders. They were the strongest on the Campari. I had the feeling I was going to need all their strength that night. Only MacDonald knew the purpose I had in mind that night. Only MacDonald knew that I intended returning the way I went. The others believed in my suicidal plan for an attack on the bridge, believed if I were successful I would be returning via the sick-bay door. But they didn’t believe I would return at all. The atmosphere was less than festive.
Bullen was awake now, lying flat on his back, his face silent and grim.
I was dressed in the same dinner suit as I’d worn the previous night. It was still damp, still crusted with blood. I’d no shoes on. The clasp-knife was in one pocket, oilskin-wrapped torch in the other, the mask round my face, hood over my head. My leg ached, I felt as a man feels after a long bout of ’ flu and the fever still burned in my blood: but I was as ready as I ever was going to be.
“Lights,” I said to Marston.
A switch clicked and the sick-bay was dark as the tomb. I drew back the curtains, pulled open the window and secured it on the latch. I stuck my head outside.
It was raining steadily, heavily, a cold driving rain out of the north-west, slanting straight in through the window on to the bed. The sky was black with no star above. The Campari still pitched a little, rolled a little, but it was nothing as compared with the previous night. She was doing about twelve knots. I twisted my neck and peered upwards. No one there. I leaned out as far as possible and looked fore and aft. If there was a light showing on the Campari that night I couldn’t see it.
I came inside, stooped, picked up a coil of nylon rope, checked that it was the one secured to the top of the iron bedstead and flung it out into the rain and the darkness. I made a last check of the rope knotted round my waist—this was the one the bo’sun held in his hands—and said: “I’m off.” As a farewell speech it could perhaps have been improved upon, but it was all I could think of at the time.
Captain Bullen said: “Good luck, my boy.” He’d have said an awful lot more if he knew what I really had in mind. Marston said something I couldn’t catch. Susan said nothing at all. I wriggled my way through the window, favouring my wounded leg, and then was fully outside, suspended from the sill by my elbows. I could sense rather than see the bo’sun by the window, ready to pay out the rope round my waist.
“Archie,” I said softly. “Give me that spiel again. The one about how everything is going to turn out all right.”
“You’ll be here again before we know you’re gone,” he said cheerfully. “See and bring my knife back.”
I felt for the rope attached to the bed, got it in both hands, eased my elbows off the sill and dropped quickly, hand over hand, as MacDonald paid out my lifeline. Five seconds later I was in the water.
The water was dark and cold and it took my breath away. After the warmth of the sick-bay the shock of the almost immediate transition, the abrupt drop in
temperature, was literally paralysing. Momentarily, involuntarily, I lost my grip on the rope, panicked when I realised what had happened, floundered about desperately and caught it again. The bo’sun was doing a good job above: the sudden increase in weight as I’d lost my lifeline must have had him half-way out of the window.
But the cold wasn’t the worst. If you can survive the initial shock you can tolerate the cold to a limited degree, accustomed but not reconciled: what you can’t tolerate, what you can’t become accustomed to is the involuntary swallowing of large mouthfuls of salt water every few seconds. And that was what was happening to me.
I had known that being towed alongside a ship doing twelve knots wasn’t going to be any too pleasant, but I had never thought it was going to be as bad as this. The factor I hadn’t taken into the reckoning was the waves. One moment I was being towed, face down and planing, up the side of a wave: the next, as the waves swept by under me, I was almost completely out of the water, then falling forwards and downwards to smash into the rising shoulder of the next wave with a jarring violence that knocked all the breath from my body. And when all the breath has been driven from you the body’s demands that you immediately gulp in air are insistent, imperative and not to be denied. But with my face buried in the sea I wasn’t gulping in air, I was gulping down large quantities of salt water. It was like having water under high pressure forced down my throat by a hose. I was floundering, porpoising, twisting and spinning exactly like a hooked fish being pulled in on the surface through the wake of a fast-trolling motorboat. Slowly, but very surely, I was drowning.
I was beaten before I started. I knew I had to get back, and at once, I was gasping and choking on sea-water, my nostrils were on fire with it, my mouth was full of it, my stomach was full of it, my throat burned with it and I knew that at least some of it had already reached my lungs.
A system of signals had been arranged, and now I began to tug frantically on the rope round my waist, hanging on to the other rope with my left hand. I tugged half a dozen times, slowly, in some sort of order at first, then, as no response came, frantically, despairingly. Nothing happened. I was porpoising up and down so violently that all MacDonald could be feeling anyway was a constant and irregular series of alternate tightenings and slackenings of the line: he had no means of distinguishing between one type of tug and another.
I tried to pull myself back on my own line, but against the onrushing pressure of the water as the Campari ploughed through that stormy sea, it was quite impossible. When the tension came off the line round my waist, it needed all the strength of both my hands just to hang on to the lifeline without being swept away. With all the strength and desperation that was in me I tried to edge forward an inch. But I couldn’t even make that inch. And I knew I couldn’t hang on much longer.
Salvation came by sheer chance: no credit to me. One particularly heavy wave had twisted me round till I was on my back, and in this position I fell into the next trough and hit the following wave with back and shoulders. Followed the inevitable explosive release of air from my lungs, the just as inevitable sucking in of fresh air—and this time I found I could breathe! Air rushed into my lungs, not water: I could breathe! Lying on my back like this, half lifted out of the water by my grip on the lifeline and with my head bent forward almost to my chest between my overhead arms, my face remained clear of the water and I could breathe.
I wasted no time but went hand over hand down the lifeline as fast as MacDonald paid out the rope about my waist. I was still swallowing some water, but not enough to matter.
After about fifteen seconds I took my left hand off the lifeline and started scraping it along the side of the ship, feeling for the rope I’d left dangling over the side of the after-deck last night. The lifeline was now sliding through my right hand and, wet though it was, it was burning the skin off my palm. But I hardly noticed it. I had to find that manilla I’d left tied to the guard-rail stanchion: if I didn’t, then it was curtains. Not only would the hopes of my carrying out my plan be at an end, it would be the end of me also. MacDonald and I had had to act on the assumption that the rope would be there and no attempt would be made to pull me back until he got the clear pre-arranged-signal that it was time to begin just that. And to make any such clear signal while in the water, I had discovered, was impossible. If the manilla wasn’t there I’d just be towed along at the end of that nylon rope until I drowned. Nor would that take long. The salt water I’d swallowed, the violent buffeting of the waves, the blows I’d suffered from being flung a score of times against the iron walls of the Campari, the loss of blood and my injured leg—all those had taken their frightening toll and I was dangerously weak. It would not be long.
My left hand brushed against the manilla: I grabbed it, a drowning man seizing the last straw in the whole endless expanse of the ocean.
Tucking the lifeline through the rope round my waist, I over-armed myself up the manilla till I was all but clear of the water, wrapped my one good leg round the rope and hung there, gasping like an exhausted dog, shivering and then being violently sick as I brought up all the sea-water that had collected in my stomach. After that I felt better, but weaker than ever. I started to climb.
I hadn’t far to go, twenty feet and I’d be there, but I hadn’t gone two feet before I was bitterly regretting the fact that I hadn’t followed my impulse of the previous night and knotted the manilla. The manilla was soaking wet and slippery and I had to clamp tight with all the strength of my hands to get any purchase at all. And there was little enough strength left in my hands, my aching forearm muscles were exhausted from clinging so long and so desperately to the lifeline: my shoulders were just as far gone, even when I could get a good purchase, even when my weakening hands didn’t slide down the rope when I put all my weight on them, I could still pull myself up only two or three inches at a time. Three inches, no more: that was all I could manage at one time.
I couldn’t make it, reason, instinct, logic, common sense all told me that I couldn’t make it: but I made it. The last few feet of the climb was something out of a dark nightmare, hauling myself up two inches, slipping back an inch, hauling myself up again and always creeping nearer the top. Three feet away from the top I stopped: I knew I was only that distance away from safety, but to climb another inch on that rope was something I knew I could never do. Arms shaking ague-like from the strain, shoulders on fire with agony, I hauled my body up until my eyes were level with knotted hands: even in that almost pitchy darkness I could see the faint white blur of my gleaming knuckles. For a second I hung there, then flung my right hand desperately upwards. If I missed the coaming of the scuppers … but I couldn’t miss it. I had no more strength in me, I could never make such an effort again.
I didn’t miss it. The top joint of my middle finger hooked over the coaming and locked there, then my other hand was beside it, I was scrabbling desperately for the lowermost bar in the guardrails, I had to get it over and over at once or I’d fall back into the sea. I found the bar, had both hands on it, swung my body convulsively to the right till my sound foot caught the coaming, reached up to the next bar, reached the teak rail, half dragged, half slid my body over the top and fell heavily on the deck on the other side.
How long I lay there, trembling violently in every weary muscle in my body, whooping hoarsely for the breath my tortured lungs were craving, gritting my teeth against the fire in my shoulders and arms, and trying not to let the red mist before my eyes envelop me completely, I do not know. It may have been two minutes, it may have been ten. Somewhere during that time I was violently ill again. And then slowly, ever so slowly, the pain eased a little, my breathing slowed and the mists before my eyes cleared away: but I still couldn’t stop trembling. It was well for me that no five-year-old happened along the deck that night: he could have had me over the side without taking his hands out of his pockets.
I untied the ropes from my waist with numbed and fumbling and all but useless hands, tied them both to the
stanchion just above the manilla, pushed the lifeline till it was almost taut, then gave three sharp deliberate tugs. A couple of seconds passed, then came three clearly defined answering tugs. They knew now I had made it. I hoped they felt better about it than I did. Not that that would be hard.
I sat there for at least another five minutes till some measure of strength came back to me, rose shakily to my feet and padded across the deck to number four hold. The tarpaulin on the starboard forward corner was still secured. That meant there was no one down below. But I really hadn’t expected them to be there yet.
I straightened, looked all around me, then stood very still, the driving rain streaming down my sodden mask and soaking clothes. Not fifteen yards away from me, right aft, I had seen a red glow come and vanish in the darkness. Ten seconds passed, then the glow again. I’d heard of waterproof cigarettes, but not all that waterproof. But someone was smoking a cigarette, no question about that.
Like falling thistledown, only quieter, I drifted down in the direction of the glow. I was still trembling, but you can’t hear trembling. Twice I stopped to line up direction and distance by that glowing cigarette and finally stopped less than ten feet away from it. My mind was hardly working at all or I’d never have dared to do it: a careless flick of a torch beam, say, and it would have been all over. But no one flicked a torch.
The red glow came again, and I could now just make out that the smoker wasn’t standing in the rain. He was in the V-shaped entrance of a tarpaulin, a big tarpaulin draped over some big object. The gun, of course, the gun that Carreras had mounted on the after-deck, with the tarpaulin serving the dual purpose of protecting the mechanism from the rain and concealing it from any other vessel they might have passed during the day.
I heard the murmur of voices. Not the smoker, but another two crouched somewhere inside the shelter of the tarpaulin. That meant three people there. Three people guarding the gun. Carreras was certainly taking no chances with that gun. But why so many as three, he didn’t need three? Then I had it. Carreras hadn’t just been talking idly when he’d spoken of the possibility of foul play in connection with the death of his son. He did suspect it, but his cold logical mind had told him that neither crew nor passengers of the Campari could have been responsible. If his son had met death by violence, then death could only have come from one of his own men. The renegade who had killed his son might strike again, might attempt to ruin his plans. And so, three men on guard together. They could watch each other.
The Golden Rendezvous Page 22
