The Golden Rendezvous

by Alistair MacLean

  And I was given no time to figure. I was only three or four feet away when, in the backwash of light from the torch, I saw Carlos reverse his grip on his tommy-gun, catch it by the barrel, swing it up high over his head. It had reached its highest point and was just started on the down-swing when the base of the heavy marline-spike caught him on the back of the neck with all my weight and fury behind it. I heard something crack, caught the tommy-gun out of his suddenly nerveless hand before it could crash to the deck and made a grab for the torch. I missed. The torch struck the deck with a muffled thud, it must have been a ship’s rubber composition issue, rolled over a couple of times and came to rest, its beam shining straight out over the edge of the ship. Carlos himself pitched heavily forward, struck Dr. Caroline, and the two of them fell against the lower steps of the companionway.

  “Keep quiet!” I whispered urgently. “Keep quiet if you want to live!” I dived for the torch, fumbled desperately for the switch, couldn’t find it, stuck the glass face against my jacket to kill the beam, finally located the switch and turned it off.

  “What in heaven’s name——”

  “Keep quiet!” I found the trigger on the automatic pistol and stood there stock-still, staring aft into the darkness, in the direction of both the hold and the gun, striving to pierce the darkness, listening as if my life depended upon it. Which it did. Ten seconds I waited. Nothing. I had to move, I couldn’t afford to wait another ten seconds. Thirty seconds would have been enough and more than enough for Carlos to dispose of Dr. Caroline: a few seconds after that and Carreras would start wondering what had happened to his trusty henchman.

  I thrust gun and torch towards Caroline, found his hands in the darkness “Hold these,” I said softly.

  “What—what is this?” An agonised whisper in the dark.

  “He was going to smash your head in. Now shut up. You can still die. I’m Carter, the chief officer.” I’d pulled Carlos clear of the companionway where he’d held Caroline pinned by the legs and was going through his pockets as quickly as I could in the darkness. The key. The key of the wireless office. I’d seen him take it from his right-hand trousers’ pocket but it wasn’t there any more. The left-hand one. Not there either. The seconds were rushing by. Desperately I tore at the patch-pockets of his army type blouse, and I found it in the second pocket. But I’d lost at least twenty seconds.

  “Is—is he dead?” Caroline whispered.

  “Are you worried? Stay here.” I shoved the key into a safe inner pocket, caught the guard by his collar and started to drag him across the wet deck. It was less than ten feet to the ship’s rail. I dropped him, located the hinged section of the teak rail, fumbled for the catch, released it, swung the rail through 180 degrees and snapped it back in its open position. I caught the guard by his shoulders, eased the upper part of his body over the second rail, then tipped the legs high. The splash he made couldn’t have been heard thirty feet away. Certainly no one in number four hold or under the gun tarpaulin could possibly have heard anything.

  I ran back to where Dr. Caroline was still sitting on the lower steps of the companionway. Maybe he was just obeying the order I’d given him, but probably he was just too dazed to move anyway. I said: “Quick, give me your wig.”

  “What? What?” My second guess had been right. He was dazed.

  “Your wig!” It’s no easy feat to shout in a whisper, but I almost made it.

  “My wig? But—but it’s glued on.”

  I leaned forward, twisted my fingers in the temporary thatch and tugged. It was glued on, all right. The gasp of pain and resistance offered to my hand showed he hadn’t been kidding: that wig felt as if it was riveted to his skull. It was no night for half measures. I clamped my left hand over his mouth and pulled savagely with my right. A limpet the size of a soup plate couldn’t have offered more resistance, but it did come off. I don’t know how much pain there was in it for him but it certainly cost me plenty: his teeth almost met through the heel of my palm.

  The machine-gun was still in his hand. I snatched it away, whirled, and stopped motionless. For the second time in a minute I could see rain slanting whitely through the vertical beam of a torch. That meant only one thing: someone was climbing up the ladder from the bottom of the hold.

  I reached the ship’s side in three long steps, placed the wig in the scuppers, laid the gun on top of it, raced back to the companionway, jerked Dr. Caroline to his feet and dragged him towards the bo’sun’s store, less than ten feet inboard from the companionway. The door was still less than halfway shut when Carreras appeared over the coaming, but his torch wasn’t pointing in our direction. I closed the door silently until only a crack remained.

  Carreras was closely followed by another man, also with a torch. Both of them headed straight for the ship’s side. I saw the beam of Carreras’s torch suddenly steady on the opened rail, then heard the sharp exclamation as he bent forward and peered in the scuppers. A moment later he was erect again, examining the gun and the wig he held in his hand. I heard him say something short and staccato, repeated several times. Then he started talking rapidly to his companion, but it was in Spanish and I couldn’t get it. He then examined the inside of the wig, indicated something with the torch beam, shook his head in what might have been sorrow but was more probably exasperated anger, flung the wig over the side and returned to the hold, taking the tommy-gun with him. His companion followed.

  “Our friend didn’t seem so happy,” I murmured.

  “He’s a devil, a devil!” Dr. Caroline’s voice was shaking, only now was he beginning to realise the narrowness of his escape, how closely death had brushed him by. “You heard him. One of his own men dead and all he could call him was a crazy fool, and he just laughed when the other man suggested they turn the ship to look for him.”

  “You understand Spanish?”

  “Pretty well. He said something like: ‘Just like that sadistic so-and-so to force Caroline to open the rail so that he could see what was coming to him.’ He thinks I turned on the guard, grabbed his gun and that in the fight, before we both went overboard, my wig was torn off. There was a handful of my hair sticking to the underside of the wig, he says.”

  “Sorry about that, Dr. Caroline.”

  “Good God, Sorry! You saved both our lives. Mine anyway. Sorry!” Dr. Caroline, I thought, was a pretty strong-nerved person, he was recovering fast from the shock. I hoped his nerves were very strong indeed, he was going to need them all to survive the ordeal of the next few hours. “It was that handful of hair that really convinced him.”

  I said nothing, and he went on: “Please tell me exactly what is going on?”

  For the next five minutes, while I kept watch through that crack in the doorway, Dr. Caroline plied me with questions and I answered them as quickly and briefly as I could. He had a highly intelligent, incisive mind, which I found vaguely surprising which in turn was a stupid reaction on my part: you don’t pick a dim-wit as the chief of development for a new atomic weapon. I supposed his rather comical-sounding name and the brief glimpse I’d had of him the previous night—a man bound hand and foot to a four-poster and looking into a torch beam with wide and staring eyes looks something less than his best—had unconsciously given me the wrong impression entirely. At the end of the five minutes he knew as much about the past developments as I did myself: what he didn’t know was what was to come, for I hadn’t the heart to tell him. He was giving me some details of the kidnap when Carreras and his companion appeared.

  They replaced battens, tied the tarpaulins and went for’ard without any delay. That meant, I supposed, that the fusing of the auxiliary time-bombs in the other two coffins were complete. I unwrapped the torch from its oilskin covering, looked around the store, picked up a few tools and switched off the light.

  “Right,” I said to Caroline. “Come on.”

  “Where?” He wasn’t keen to go anywhere, and after what he’d been through I didn’t blame him.

  “Back down tha
t hold. Hurry. We may have little enough time.”

  Two minutes later, with the battens and tarpaulins as well pulled back into place as possible above us, we were on the floor of the hold. I needn’t have bothered bringing any tools, Carreras had left his behind him, scattered carelessly around. Understandably he hadn’t bothered to remove them: he would never be using these tools again.

  I gave Caroline the torch to hold, selected a screwdriver and started on the lid of the brass-plaqued coffin.

  “What are you going to do?” Caroline asked nervously.

  “You can see what I’m doing.”

  “For pity’s sake be careful! That weapon is armed!”

  “So it’s armed. It’s not due to go off until when?”

  “Seven o’clock. But it’s highly unsafe, highly unsafe. It’s as unstable as hell. Good God, Carter, I know. I know!” His unsteady hand went on my arm, his face contorted with anxiety. “The development of this missile wasn’t fully completed when it was stolen. The fuse mechanism was only in an untried experimental state, and tests showed that the retaining spring on the trembler switch is far too weak. The Twister is dead safe normally, but this trembler switch is brought into circuit as soon as it is armed.”

  “And?”

  “A jar, a knock, the slightest fall—anything could overcome the tension of the spring and short-circuit the firing mechanism. Fifteen seconds later the bomb goes up.”

  I hadn’t noticed until then, but it was much warmer down in that hold than it had been on deck. I raised a soaking sleeve in a half-witted attempt to wipe some sweat off my forehead.

  “Have you told Carreras this?” The warmth was also affecting my voice, bringing it out as a harsh strained croak.

  “I told him. He won’t listen. I think—I think Carreras is a little mad. More than a little. He seems perfectly prepared to take a chance. And he has the Twister tightly packed in cotton wool and blankets to eliminate the possibility of a jar.”

  I gazed at him for a long moment without really seeing him, then got on with the next screw. It seemed much stiffer than the last one but it was just possible that I wasn’t applying so much pressure as I had been before. For all that, I had all the screws undone inside three minutes. Gently I slid off the lid, placed it to one side, slowly peeled back a couple of blankets and there lay the Twister. It looked more evil than ever.

  “Of course.”

  “There are your tools. Disarm the bloody thing.”

  He stared at me, his face suddenly empty of expression. “That’s why we’re here?”

  “Why else? Surely it was obvious? Get on with it.”

  “It can’t be done.”

  “It can’t be done?” I caught him by the arm, not gently. “Look friend, you armed the damn’ thing. Just reverse the process, that’s all.”

  “Impossible.” Finality in the voice. “When it’s armed, the mechanism is locked in position. With a key. The key is in Carreras’s pocket.”

  XI.

  Saturday 1 a.m.—2.15 a.m.

  The weakness in my left leg, a near paralysing weakness, hit me all of a sudden and I had to sit down on the baffle and hang on to the ladder for support. I gazed at the Twister. For a long time I gazed down at it, with bitter eyes: then I stirred and looked at Dr. Caroline.

  “Would you mind repeating that?”

  He repeated it. “I’m terribly sorry, Carter, but there you have it. The Twister can’t be rendered safe without the key. And Carreras has the key.”

  I thought of all the impossible solutions to this one and recognised them at once for what they were—impossible. I knew what had to be done now, the only thing that could be done. I said tiredly: “Do you know, Dr. Caroline, that you’ve just condemned forty people to certain death?”

  “I have done that?”

  “Well, Carreras. When he put that key in his pocket he was condemning himself and all his men to death just as surely as the man who pulls the switch for the electric chair. And what am I worrying about, anyway? Death’s the only certain and permanent cure for scourges like Carreras and the people who associate with him. As for Lord Dexter, he’s rolling in the stuff. He can always build another Campari.”

  “What are you talking about, Mr. Carter?” There was apprehension in his face as he looked at me, more than apprehension, fear. “Are you feeling all right, Carter?”

  “Of course I’m all right,” I said irritably. “Everybody’s always asking the same stupid questions.” I stooped, picked up the rope grommet and Haltrac Midget Hoist I’d taken from the bo’sun’s store, then rose wearily to my feet. “Come on, Doctor, give me a hand with this.”

  “Give you a hand with what?” He knew damn’ well what I meant but the fear in his mind would-n’t let him believe it.

  “The Twister, of course,” I said impatiently. “I want to get it over to the port side, hidden in the tarpaulins behind the baffle.”

  “Are you crazy?” he whispered. “Are you quite crazy? Did you hear what I said? You’re going to lift it out of its coffin with—with that? One little slip, the tiniest jar——”

  “Are you going to help me?”

  He shook his head, shuddered and turned away. I hooked the hoist on to a head-high rung of the ladder, pulled the lower block until it hung just above the Twister, picked up the grommet and moved around to the tail of the weapon. I was stooping low over it when I heard a quick footstep behind me and a pair of arms locked themselves around my body, arms informed with all the strength of fear and desperation. I struggled briefly to free myself but I might as well have tried to shrug off the tentacles of a squid. I tried to stamp on his instep but all I did was hurt my heel: I’d forgotten that I wasn’t wearing shoes.

  “Let go!” I said savagely. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m not going to let you do it! I’m not going to let you do it!” He was panting, his voice low and hoarse and desperate. “I’m not going to let you kill us all!”

  There are certain people in certain situations with whom there is no arguing. This was such a situation and Caroline such a person. I half turned, thrust backwards with all the power of my good leg and heard him gasp as his back struck heavily against the ship’s side. A momentary loosening of his grip, a wrench and I was free. I picked up the big marline-spike and showed it to him in the light of the torch.

  “I don’t want to use this,” I said quietly. “Next time I will. My promise. Can’t you stop shaking long enough to realise that I’m trying to save all our lives, not throw them away. Don’t you realise that anyone might pass by up top any moment, see the loose tarpaulin and investigate?”

  He stood there, hunched against the metal, staring down at the floor. He said nothing. I turned, took the torch in my teeth, placed the grommet on the edge of the coffin and bent down to lift the tail of the Twister. Or to try to lift it. It weighed a ton. To me it did, anyway, what with one thing and another I wasn’t as fit as I had been. I’d managed to lift it perhaps three inches and didn’t see how I was going to hold it there for even a couple of seconds when I heard a footstep and a kind of moan behind me. I tensed, braced myself for the next assault, then relaxed slowly as Dr. Caroline stepped past me, bent down and slid the grommet round the tail of the Twister. Together we managed to move the grommet up to approximately the mid-point of the missile. Neither of us said anything.

  I hauled on the Haltrac pulley until it became taut. Dr. Caroline said hoarsely: “It’ll never take it. That thin cord——”

  “It’s tested to a thousand pounds.” I hauled some more and the tail began to lift. The grommet wasn’t central. I lowered it again, the grommet was adjusted, and next time I hauled the Twister came clear along its entire length. When it was about three inches above its cotton wool and blanket bed, I set the automatic lock. I mopped my forehad again. It was warmer than ever down in that hold.

  “How are we going to get it across to the other side?” Caroline’s voice had lost its shake now, it wa
s flat and without inflection, the voice of a man resigned to the dark inevitability of a nightmare.

  “We’ll carry it across. Between us we should manage it.”

  “Carry it across?” he said dully. “It weighs 275 lb.”

  “I know what it weighs,” I said irritably.

  “You have a bad leg.” He hadn’t heard me. “My heart’s not good. The ship’s rolling, you can see that that polished aluminium is as slippery as glass. One of us would stumble, lose his grip. Maybe both of us. It would be bound to fall.”

  “Wait here,” I said. I took the torch, crossed to the port side, picked up a couple of tarpaulins from behind the baffle and dragged them across the floor. “We’ll place it on these and pull it across.”

  “Pull it across the floor? Bump it across the floor?” He wasn’t as resigned to the nightmare as I had thought. He looked at me, then at the Twister, then at me again and said with unshakable conviction: ‘’You’re mad.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, can’t you think of something else to say?” I grabbed the pulley again, released the lock, hauled and kept on hauling. Caroline wrapped both arms round the Twister as it came clear of the coffin, struggling to make sure that the nose of the missile didn’t collide with the baffle.

  “Step over the baffle and take it with you,” I said. “Keep your back to the ladder as you turn.”

  He nodded silently, his face strained and set in the pale beam of the torch. He put his back to the ladder, tightened his grip on the Twister, an arm on each side of the grommet, lifted his leg to clear the baffle, then staggered as a sudden roll of the ship threw the weight of the missile against him. His foot caught the top of the baffle, the combined forces of the Twister and the ship’s roll carried him beyond his centre of gravity, he cried out and overbalanced heavily across the baffle to the floor of the hold.