The Dark Crusader

by Alistair MacLean

  I stared out into the rain and the darkness and I thought of just three things during the interminable hours of that night: the island we were on, Captain Fleck and Marie Hopeman.

  I knew little enough about Polynesian islands, but I did recall that those coral islets were of two types: atolls, and barrier reefs for larger islands. If we were on the former, a broken, circular and probably uninhabited ring of coral islets, the future looked bleak indeed: but if it were part of a reef enclosing the lagoon round a large and possibly inhabited island, then we might still be lucky.

  I thought of Captain Fleck. I thought of how much I would give for the chance of meeting him again, and what would happen then, and I wondered why he had done what he had done and who was the man behind the kidnap and attempted murder. One thing seemed certain and that was that the missing scientists and their wives were going to stay missing: I had been classified as redundant and would never now find out where they were or what had happened to them. Right then I wasn’t so worried about them, the longing to meet up with Fleck was the predominant emotion in my mind. A strange man. A hard callous ruthless man but a man I would have sworn was not all bad. But I knew nothing of him. All I did know now with certainty was his reason for deciding to wait till nine o’clock before getting rid of us: he must have known that the schooner had been passing a coral reef and if they’d thrown us overboard at seven o’clock we might well have been washed up before morning. If we had been found, identified and traced back to the Grand Pacific Hotel, Fleck would have had a great deal of explaining to do.

  And I thought of Marie Hopeman, not as a person but as a problem. Whatever dark forebodings had possessed her had had no validity in themselves, they were just symptomatic of something else, and I no longer had any doubts about what that something else was. She was sick, not mentally but physically: the succession of bad flights from England to Suva and then the night on the boat and now all this all added up to far too little sleep and too little food, and the lack of those coupled with physical exhaustion had lowered her resistance till she was pretty open to anything that came along: and what was coming along was fever or chill or just plain old-fashioned ‘flu: there had certainly been plenty of that around when we had left London. I didn’t like to think what the outcome was going to be if she had to spend another twenty-four hours in sea-soaked clothes on this bare and exposed islet. Or even twelve.

  Sometimes during the night my eyes became so tired from staring into the rain and the darkness that I began to have some mild forms of hallucination. I thought I could see lights moving in the rain-blurred distance, and that was bad enough: but when I began to imagine I could hear voices, I resolutely shut my eyes and tried to force myself into sleep. Sitting hunched forward on a water-can with only a soaking blanket for cover, falling off to sleep is quite a feat. But I finally made it, about an hour before the dawn.

  I awoke with the sun hot on my back. I woke to the sound of voices, real voices, this time. I awoke to the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.

  I flung back the overhanging blanket as Marie stirred and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. It was a gleaming glorious dazzling world, a peaceful sun-warmed panorama of beauty that made the long night just gone a dark nightmare that could never have been.

  A string of coral isles and reefs, reefs painted in the most impossible greens and yellows and violets and browns and whites, stretched away on both sides from us in two huge curving horns that all but encircled and enclosed a huge lagoon of burnished aquamarine, and, beyond the lagoon, the most remarkably-shaped island I’d ever laid eyes on. It was as if some giant hand had cut a giant stetson down the middle, and thrown one half away. The island reached its highest point in the extreme north, where it plunged vertically down into the sea: from this peak, it sloped down steeply to the east and south – I could only guess that it would be the same on the west – and where the wide brim of the stetson would have been was a flat plain running down to beaches of dazzling white sand which, even at that hour of the morning and at a distance of three miles, was positively hurtful to the eyes. The mountain itself, a rich bluish-purple in that early sunlight, was bald and bare of any vegetation: the plain below was bare, too, only scrub bushes and grass, with scattered palm down near the water’s edge.

  But I didn’t spend much time on the scenery, I’d like to think I’d be right in there with the next man when it came to appreciating the beauties of nature, but not after a rain-soaked and chilly night on an exposed reef: I was far more interested in the outrigger canoe that was coming arrowing in towards us through the mirror-calm waters of that green lagoon.

  There were two men in it, big sturdy brown-skinned men with huge mops of crinkly black hair and their paddles were driving in perfect unison into and through the gleaming glass of those waters faster than I would have believed possible, moving so quickly that the flying spray from the paddles was a continuously iridescent rainbow glitter in the rays of the rising sun. Less than twenty yards away from the reef they dug their paddles deep, slowed down their outrigger canoe and brought it slewing round to a standstill less than ten feet away. One of the men jumped out into the thigh-deep water, waded towards us then climbed nimbly up the coral. His feet were bare but the sharp rock didn’t worry him any that I could see. His face was a comical mixture of astonishment and good humour, astonishment at finding two white people on a reef at that hour of the morning, good humour because the world was a wonderful place and always would be. You don’t see that kind of face often, but when you do you can never mistake it. Good humour won. He gave us a huge white grin and said something that meant nothing at all to me.

  He could see that it meant nothing at all and he wasn’t the kind of man to waste time. He looked at Marie, shook his head and clucked his tongue as his eyes took in the pale face, the two unnaturally red patches on her cheeks and the purplish shadows under her eyes, then grinned again, ducked his head as in greeting, picked her up and waded out to the canoe. I made it under my own steam, lugging the two water drums along.

  The canoe was fitted with a mast, but there was no wind yet, so we had to paddle across the lagoon to the island. At least the two brown men did and I was glad to leave it to them. What they did with that canoe would have had me gasping and wheezing in five minutes and in a hospital bed in ten. They’d have been a sensation at Henley. They kept it up non-stop for the twenty minutes it took us to cross the lagoon, churning up the water as if the Loch Ness monster was after them, but still finding time and energy to chatter and laugh with each other all the way. If they were representative of the rest of the island’s population, we had fallen into good hands.

  And that there were others on the island was obvious. As we came close to the shore, I could count at least half a dozen houses, stilted affairs with the floor about three feet off the ground and enormously deep-eaved thatched roofs that swept down steeply from high ridge-poles to within four or five feet of the ground. The houses had neither doors nor windows, understandably enough, for they had no walls either, except for one, the largest, in a clearing near the shore, close in to a stand of coconut palms: the other houses were set farther back and to the south. Still farther south was a metal and corrugated iron eyesore, grey in colour, like an old-fashioned crushing plant and hopper in a quarry. Beyond this again was a long low shed, with a slightly sloping corrugated iron roof: it must have been a real pleasure to work under that when the sun was high in the sky.

  We were heading in just to the right of a small pier – not a real landing-stage with anchored piles but a thirty-foot-long floating platform of bound logs, secured on the shore end by ropes tied round a couple of tree stumps – when I saw a man lying on the shore. A white man, sunbathing. He was a lean wiry old bird with a lot of white hair all over his face, dark spectacles on his eyes and a grubby towel strategically placed across his midriff. He appeared to be asleep, but he wasn’t, for when the bow of the canoe crunched into the sand he sat up with a jerk, whipped off this dark glasses, pe
ered myopically in our direction, pawed around the sand till he located a pair of slightly-tinted spectacles, stuck them across the bridge of his nose, said, ‘God bless my soul!’ in an agitated voice jumped to his feet with remarkable speed for such an old duffer and hurried into a nearby palm-thatched hut clutching his towel round him.

  ‘Quite a tribute to you, my dear,’ I murmured.

  ‘You looking like something the tide washed up and the old boy about ninety-nine, but you can still knock him for six.’

  ‘He didn’t seem any too pleased to see us, I thought,’ she said doubtfully. She smiled at the big man who’d just lifted her from the canoe and set her on her feet on the sand and went on: ‘Maybe he’s a recluse. Maybe he’s one of those remittanceman beachcombers and other white people are the last he wants to see.’

  ‘He’s just gone for his best bib and tucker,’ I said confidently. ‘He’ll be back in a minute to give us the big hand.’

  And he was. We’d hardly reached the top of the beach when he reappeared from the hut, dressed in a white shirt and white ducks, with a panama on his head. He’d a white beard, flowing white moustache and plentiful thick white hair. If Buffalo Bill had ever worn tropical whites and a straw hat, he’d have been a dead ringer for Buffalo Bill.

  He came puffing down to meet us, his hand outstretched in greeting. I’d made no mistake about the warmth of welcome, but I had about the age: he wasn’t a day over sixty, perhaps only five-five, and a pretty fit fifty-five at that.

  ‘God bless my soul, God bless my soul!’ He wrung our hands as if we’d brought him the first prize in the Irish Sweepstake. ‘What a surprise! Morning dip, you know – just drying off – couldn’t believe my eyes – where in all the world have you two come from? No, no, don’t answer now. Straight up to my house. Delightful surprise, delightful.’ He scurried off in front of us, God blessing himself with every other step. Marie smiled at me and we walked after him.

  He led us along a short path, across a white-shingled front, up a wide flight of six wooden steps into his house: like the others, the floor was well clear of the ground. But once inside I could see why, unlike the other houses, it had walls: it had to have, to support the large bookcases and glass-covered showcases that lined three-quarters of the wall area of the room. The rest of the walls were given over to doors and window spaces, no glass in the windows, just screens of plaited leaves that could be raised or lowered as wished. There was a peculiar smell that I couldn’t place at first. The floor seemed to be made of the mid-ribs of some type of leaf, coconut palm, probably, laid across close-set joists, and there was no ceiling as such, just steep-angled rafters with thatch above. I looked at this thatch for a long and very interested moment. There was a big old-fashioned roll-top desk in one corner and a large safe against the inside wall. There were some brightly coloured straw mats on the floor, most of which was given over to low-slung comfortable looking rattan chairs and settees, each with a low table beside it. A man could be comfortable in that room – especially with a drink in his hand.

  The old boy – with that beard and moustache I couldn’t think of him as anything else – was a mind-reader.

  ‘Sit down, sit down. Make yourselves comfortable. A drink? Yes, yes, of course, first of all a drink. You need it, you need it.’ He picked up a little bell, rang it furiously as if he were trying to see how much punishment it could stand before it came apart in his hands, replaced it and looked at me. ‘Too early in the morning for whisky, eh?’

  ‘Not this morning.’

  ‘And you, young lady. Some brandy, perhaps? Eh? Brandy?’

  ‘Thank you.’ She let him have the smile she never bothered letting me have and I could just about see the old boy’s toes curling. ‘You are very kind.’

  I was just coming to the resigned conclusion that his staccato and repetitive talking was habitual and was going to be a thought wearing if we had to stay with him for any length of time – and I had the thought, even then, that the voice was vaguely familiar to me – when a rear door opened and a Chinese youth came in. He was very short, very thin, dressed in khaki drill and the only use he had for his facial muscles was to keep his expression buttoned up for he didn’t even bat an eyelid when he saw us.

  ‘Ah, Tommy, there you are. We have guests, Tommy. Drinks. Brandy for the lady, a large whisky for the gentleman and – let me see now, yes, yes, perhaps I rather think I will – a small whisky for me. Then run a bath. For the lady.’ I could get by with a shave. ‘Then breakfast. You haven’t had breakfast yet?’

  I assured him we hadn’t.

  ‘Excellent! Excellent!’ He caught sight of the two men who had rescued us standing outside on the white shingles with the water drums, raised a bushy white eyebrow in my direction and said: ‘What’s in those?’

  ‘Our clothes.’

  ‘Indeed? Yes, yes, I see. Clothes.’ Any opinion he held as to our eccentricities in the choice of suitcases he kept to himself. He went to the doorway. ‘Just leave them there, James. You’ve done a splendid job, both of you. Splendid. I’ll speak to you later.’

  I watched the two men smile broadly, then turn away. I said: ‘They speak English?’

  ‘Certainly. Of course they do.’

  ‘They didn’t speak any to us.’

  ‘Um. They didn’t, eh?’ He tugged his beard, Buffalo Bill to the life. ‘You speak any to them?’

  I thought, then grinned: ‘No.’

  ‘There you are then. You might have been any of a score of nationalities.’ He turned as the Chinese boy came in, took the drinks from the tray and handed them to us. ‘Your excellent health.’

  I grunted something appropriate and as short as it could decently be and went for that drink like a thirst-stricken camel for the nearest oasis. I insulted a perfectly good Scotch by swallowing half of it at one gulp, but even so it tasted wonderful and I was about to start on the remainder when the old boy said: ‘Well, preliminaries over, decencies observed. Your story, sir. Let’s have it.’

  It brought me up short and I looked at him cautiously. I could be wrong about him being a happy old fusspot. I was wrong. The bright blue eyes were shrewd, and what little of his face was available for expression seemed to indicate a certain carefulness, if not actual wariness. Being a little odd in your behaviour doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a little odd in the head.

  I gave it to him, short and straight. I said: ‘My wife and I were en route to Australia, by plane. During an overnight stop at Suva we were taken from our hotel at three in the morning by a Captain Fleck and two Indians, forced to board his schooner and locked up. Last night we heard them planning to murder us, so we broke out from the hold where they’d put us – it was a bad night and they didn’t see us go – jumped over the side and after some time washed up on a coral reef. Your men found us there this morning.’

  ‘God bless my soul! What an extraordinary tale. Extraordinary!’ He kept on blessing himself and shaking his head for a bit, then looked up at me from under bushy white eyebrows. ‘If we could have it with a little more detail, perhaps?’

  So I gave it to him again, telling him everything that had happened since we had arrived in Suva. He peered at me through those tinted glasses all the time I was speaking and when I finished he sighed, did some more head shaking and said: ‘Incredible. The whole thing’s quite incredible!’

  ‘Do you mean that literally?’

  ‘What? What? That I don’t believe you? But I do believe it, young man! It’s just that everything is so bizarre, so – so fantastic. Of course it’s true, how else would you be here? But – but why should this villainous fellow, this Captain Fleck kidnap you and talk of killing you? It all seems so purposeless, so mad.’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘The only thing I can think of – and even that is ridiculous – is that I’m a scientist, a specialist in fuel technology and maybe someone wanted to extract some information from me. Why on earth they should want to do that I just can’t imagine. And how the sk
ipper of an obscure schooner knew that we should be flying out to Australia via Fiji – well, it doesn’t make any kind of sense at all.’

  ‘As you say, it makes no sense at all. Mr – ah – bless my soul, you must forgive me! I haven’t even asked your names yet!’

  ‘Bentall. John Bentall. And this is my wife, Marie.’ I smiled at him. ‘And you don’t need to tell me who you are. It’s just come back to me. Dr Harold Witherspoon – Professor Witherspoon, I should say. The doyen of British archaeologists.’

  ‘You know me then? You recognized me?’ The old boy seemed bucked about it.

  ‘Well, you do get a good deal of newspaper space,’ I said tactfully. Professor Witherspoon’s love for the public limelight was a byword. ‘And I saw your series of lectures on television, about a year ago.’

  He didn’t look so pleased any longer. He suddenly looked downright suspicious, and his eyes narrowed as he said: ‘You interested in archaeology, Mr Bentall? Know anything about it, I mean?’

  ‘I’m like a million others, Professor. I know about this Egyptian tomb and this lad Tutankhamen who was in it. But I couldn’t begin to spell his name, I doubt if I’m even pronouncing it properly.’

  ‘So. Good. Forgive my asking, I’ll explain later. I am being most remiss, most remiss. This young lady here is far from well. Fortunately, I’m a bit of a doctor. Have to be, you know. Living your life at the back of beyond.’ He hustled out of the room, returned with a medical case, took out a thermometer and asked Marie to put it in her mouth while he took her wrist.

  I said: ‘I don’t want to appear ungrateful or unappreciative of your hospitality, Professor, but my business is rather urgent. How soon will we be able to leave here and get back to Suva?’

  ‘Not long.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s a ketch from Kandavu – that’s about a hundred miles or so north of here – calls in about every six weeks. It was last here, let me see – yes, about three weeks ago. So, another three weeks.’