The Dark Crusader

by Alistair MacLean

  I didn’t expect to find anything there that I wouldn’t have found in any other kitchen, and I didn’t. But I found what I was after, the cutlery drawer. Tommy had a fine selection of carving knives, all of them honed to a razor’s edge. I picked a beauty, a ten-inch triangular job, serrated on one side and straight on the other that tapered from two inches below the hilt to just nothing at all. It had the point of a surgeon’s lancet. It was better than nothing, it was a lot better than nothing, if I could find the gap between the ribs not even Hewell would think I was tickling him. I wrapped it carefully in a kitchen cloth and stuck it under my belt.

  The inside kitchen door, the one giving on the central passage, was made of wood, to keep the cooking smells from percolating throughout the house, I supposed. It opened inwards on oiled leather hinges. I eased myself through into the passage and stood there listening. I didn’t have to listen very hard. The professor was something less than a silent sleeper and the source of the snoring, a room with an opened door about ten feet up the passage on the right, was easy to locate. I had no idea where the Chinese boy slept, I hadn’t seen him leaving the house so I assumed that he must be in one of the other rooms and I didn’t intend to find out which. He seemed to me like a boy who would sleep very lightly indeed. I hoped the professor’s adenoidal orchestration would blanket any noise I might make but for all that I went up the passage towards the living-room door with all the rush and clatter of a cat stalking a bird across a sunlit lawn.

  I made it in safety and closed the door behind me without even a whisper of sound. I didn’t waste any time looking around the room, I knew where to look and went straight for the big knee-hole desk. If the direction of the burnished copper wire, not quite buried in the thatch, that had caught my eye when first I’d sat in the rattan chair that morning hadn’t been guide enough, my nose would have led me straight there: the pungent smell, however faint, of sulphuric acid is unmistakable.

  Most kneehole desks are lined on either side with a row of drawers, but Professor Witherspoon’s was an exception. There was a cupboard on either side and neither of them was locked. There was no reason why they should have been. I opened the left-hand door first and shone the pencil beam of light inside.

  The compartment was big, thirty inches high by eighteen wide and perhaps two feet in depth. It was packed with lead acid accumulators and dry batteries. There were ten of the accumulators on an upper shelf, big glass-sided 2.5-volt cells, wired together in series: below were eight Exide 120-volt dry-cell batteries, wired up in parallel. Enough power there to send a signal to the moon, if a man had a radio transmitter. And the man had a radio transmitter. It was in the locker on the other side. It took up the entire space of the locker. I know a little of transmitter-receivers but this metallic grey mass with its score or more of calibrated dials, wave-bands and tuning knobs was quite unknown to me. I peered closely at the maker’s name and it read: ‘Kuruby-Sankowa Radio Corporation, Osaka and Shanghai.’ It didn’t mean a thing to me, any more than the jumble of Chinese characters engraved beneath it. The wave-lengths and receiving stations on the transmitting wave-band were marked in both Chinese and English and the needle was locked on Foochow. Perhaps Professor Witherspoon was the kind-hearted sort of employer who allowed his homesick workers to speak to their relatives in China. But perhaps he wasn’t.

  I closed the door softly and turned my attention to the upper part of the desk. The professor might have known I was coming, he hadn’t even bothered to pull down the roll-top. After five minutes’ methodical search I was beginning to understand why he hadn’t bothered, there was nothing in the desk-top drawers and pigeonholes worth concealing. I was about to give up and fold my tent when I looked again at the most obvious thing on that desk – the blotting pad with its four-cornered leather holder. I took the blotters out of the holder and looked down at the piece of thin parchment paper that had been concealed between the lowest blotter and the pad.

  It was a typewritten list of six lines, each line consisting of a double-barrelled name followed by figures, eight figures every time. The first line read: ‘Pelican-Takishamaru 20007815,’ the second: ‘Linkiang-Hawetta 10346925’ and so on with the other four lines containing equally meaningless names and combinations of figures.

  Then there was a space of an inch then another line which read: ‘Every hour 46 Tombola.’

  I could make nothing of it. It seemed to be about the most useless information – if that’s what it was – that anyone could ever want. Or I could be looking at the most important code I’d ever seen. Either way, it didn’t seem much help to me, but it might help later. Colonel Raine reckoned I’d a photographic memory, but not for this kind of junk. I took pencil and paper from the professor’s desk, copied the writing, put the parchment back where I’d found it, took off my shoe, folded the paper and placed it, wrapped in some waterproof polythene, between the sole of my foot and my sock. I didn’t fancy making that traverse through the passage to the kitchen again, so I left through a window remote from Hewell’s and the workers’ houses.

  Twenty minutes later I was well clear of all the houses and rose painfully to my feet. I hadn’t travelled so far on my hands, elbows and knees since my nursery days and I’d lost the hang of the thing: moreover, years of not moving around on them had made mine quite unsuitable for this kind of locomotion and they ached fiercely: but they weren’t in any worse condition than the clothes that covered them.

  The sky was almost completely overcast, but not quite, and every now and then a sudden unveiling of the almost full moon made me drop quickly into the shelter of some scrub or bush and wait until the sky darkened over again. I was following the line of the railway tracks which led from the crushing mills and drying shed round to the south and then, presumably, west of the island. I was very interested in this line and its destination. Professor Witherspoon had carefully refrained from making any mention of what lay on the other side of the island, but for all his care Professor Witherspoon talked too much. He’d told me that the phosphate company used to take 1,000 tons a day out of the hillside, and as it wasn’t there any more they must have taken it away. That meant a ship, a big ship, and no big ship would ever have used that tiny floating pier of logs below the professor’s house, even if it could have approached it closely enough in the shallow lagoon water, which it couldn’t. Something bigger was needed, something much bigger: a stone or concrete pier, maybe one made from coral blocks, and either a crane or a raised hopper with a canted loading chute. Maybe Professor Witherspoon hadn’t wished me to walk in this direction.

  A few seconds later I was wishing the same thing myself. I’d just passed over a tiny culvert where a small stream, almost covered in with bushes and thickets, ran down from the mountain to the sea, and had taken no more than ten paces beyond when there came the quick stealthy rush of padding feet behind me, something heavy crashed into my back and shoulder and then, before I’d time to start reacting, something else closed over my upper left arm, just above the elbow, with all the power and brutal savagery of a sprung bear-trap. The immediate pain was agonizing.

  Hewell. That was my first and instinctive reaction as I staggered and lurched and all but fell. Hewell, it must be Hewell, no one else I’d ever known could have a grip like that, it felt as if my arm was being crushed in half. I swung round in a vicious half-circle hooking with all the strength of my right arm for where his stomach ought to have been and all I did was to make a hole in the night. I almost dislocated my right shoulder but I’d more to think about than that as I lurched sideways again, fighting for my balance. Fighting for my balance and fighting for my life. It wasn’t Hewell who had me, but a dog about the size and power of a wolf.

  I tried to tear him off with my right hand but all it did was to sink those huge teeth still deeper into my arm. I tried crashing my right fist again and again against that powerful body but he was so far to my left and back that I could barely reach him. I tried kicking, but I couldn’t get anywhere near him.
I couldn’t get at him, I couldn’t shake him off, there was no solid object I could crush him against and I knew that if I tried falling on top of him he’d have loosened his grip and had my throat before I knew what he was about.

  He must have weighed between eighty and ninety pounds. He had fangs like steel hooks and when you have steel hooks embedded in your arm and a weight of ninety pounds suspended from them only one thing can happen – the skin and flesh start to tear, and I haven’t any different skin or flesh from anyone else. I could feel myself getting weak, I could feel the waves of pain and nausea washing over me when, in a moment of clarity, my mind or what passes for it started working again. I’d no trouble in getting the knife clear of my belt, but it took almost ten interminable and pain-filled seconds before I could free it one-handed from its cloth wrapping. After that it was easy, the stiletto point entered just below the breastbone and angled inwards and upwards for the heart, meeting almost no resistance. The bear-trap grip on my arm loosened in a fraction of a second and the dog was dead before it reached the ground.

  I didn’t know what kind of dog it was and I didn’t care. I hauled him by his heavy-studded collar till I came to the culvert I’d so recently crossed, dragged him down the short bank to the stream and pulled him into the water where the bushes were thickest. I thought he would be pretty well screened from sight above but I didn’t dare use my torch to see. I jammed him in place with some heavy stones so that no freshet after heavy rain could wash him into view, then lay face down by the stream for almost five minutes till the sharpest of the pain, the shock and nausea had worn off and my racing pulse and pounding heart returned to something like normal. It had been a bad couple of minutes.

  Getting my shirt and singlet off was no pleasure at all, the arm was already stiffening up, but I managed it and washed my arm thoroughly in the running water. I was glad it was fresh water and not salt. Washing my arm, I thought, was going to do me a great deal of good if that dog had been suffering from hydrophobia, about the same effect as if I washed my arm after a king cobra had struck. But there didn’t seem to be much point in worrying about it, so I bandaged up my arm as well as I could with strips torn from my singlet, pulled on my shirt, climbed out of the culvert and continued on my way, still following the metal tracks. I carried the knife in my right hand now and I hadn’t any cloth wrapped round it either. I felt chilled, cold with the ice-cold of a vicious anger. I wasn’t kindly disposed towards anyone.

  I was almost round to the south of the island now. There were no trees, just bushes and scattered low scrub that was no good for concealment at all unless you lay prone on the ground, and I wasn’t in the mood for lying prone on the ground. But I hadn’t altogether taken leave of my senses and when the moon suddenly broke through into a large patch quite free from cloud I dropped flat and peered out from the shelter of some bushes that wouldn’t have given decent cover to a rabbit.

  In the brilliant wash of the moonlight I could see now that my first impression of the island from the reef that morning hadn’t been entirely accurate, the early morning mists had obscured the true features to the south of the island. True, the narrow plain at the foot of the mountain did, from where it lay, seem to go all the way round the island, but it was much narrower here than in the east. Moreover, it didn’t slope steadily towards the sea but seemed even to slope from the sea to the base of the mountain: which meant only one thing, that the island to the south must end in a very steep drop to the lagoon, perhaps even a sheer cliff-face. And I hadn’t been right about the mountain either, although this new feature I couldn’t have seen from the reef: instead of having the continuously smooth steeply-sloping surface of a cone, the mountain seemed to be almost completely bisected down its southerly face by a gigantic cleft or ravine, no doubt a relic of that catastrophic day when the northern half of the mountain had vanished into the sea. What this entire physical configuration amounted to was that the only way from east to west on this island appeared to lie across the narrow connecting belt of plain to the south: it couldn’t have been more than a hundred and twenty yards wide.

  Fifteen minutes later that patch in the clouds was twice as large and the moon still in the middle of it, so I decided to move. In that bright moonlight a move backwards would have been just as conspicuous as a move forwards, so I decided I might as well keep going on. I cursed that moon pretty steadily. I said things about that moon that the poets and the Tin Pan Alley merchants wouldn’t have approved of at all. But they would have approved of the unreserved apology I made to the moon only a couple of minutes later.

  I had been inching forward on what was left of my elbows and knees, with my head about nine inches above the ground, when suddenly I saw something else about nine inches above the ground and less than a couple of feet from my eyes. It was a wire, strung above the ground on little steel pins with looped heads, and I hadn’t seen it farther away because it was painted black. The paint, its low height above the ground, the presence of a dog wandering around and the fact that the wire wasn’t strung on insulators made it pretty clear that it wasn’t an electric circuit carrying some kind of lethal current. It was an old-fashioned trip-wire. It would be connected up with some kind of mechanical warning device.

  I waited twenty minutes without moving until the moon had again gone behind the clouds, rose stiffly to my feet, crossed the wire and got down again. The land had now quite a definite dip to my right, towards the base of the mountain, and the railway track had been raised and banked on one side to meet the angle of the ground. It seemed like a good idea to crawl along beneath the raised edge of the embankment: I would be in shadow if the moon broke through again. Or I hoped I would be.

  I was. After almost half an hour more of this elbow and knees caper during which I saw nothing and heard nothing and thought with increasing sympathetic admiration of the lower members of the animal kingdom who were doomed to spend their lives getting around in this fashion, the moon broke through again. And this time I really saw something.

  Less than thirty yards ahead of me I saw a fence. I had seen such fences and they weren’t the kind that surround an English meadow. Where I’d seen them before had been in Korea, round prisoner-of-war cages. This one was a nine-stranded barbed-wire affair, over six feet high and curving outwards at the top: it emerged from the impenetrable darkness of the vertically-walled cleft in the mountain to my right and ran due south across the plain.

  Perhaps ten yards beyond that there was another fence, a duplicate of the first, but what occupied my attention was not either of the fences but a group of three men I could see beyond the second fence. They were standing together, talking, I presumed, but so softly that I couldn’t hear what they were saying, and one of them had just lit a cigarette. They were dressed in white ducks, round caps, gaiters and cartridge belts, and carried rifles slung over their shoulders. They were, without any doubt at all, seamen of the Royal Navy.

  By this time my mind had given up. I was tired. I was exhausted. I couldn’t think any more. Given time, I could maybe have thought of a couple of good reasons why I should suddenly on this remote Fijian island stumble across three seamen of the Royal Navy, but that seemed a daft sort of thing to do when all I had to do was to stand up and ask them. I transferred the weight from my elbows to the palms of my hands and started to get to my feet.

  Three yards ahead of me a bush moved. Shock froze me into involuntary and life-saving immobility, no relic dug out by the professor was ever half so petrified as I was at that moment. The bush leaned over gently towards another bush and murmured something in so low a voice that I couldn’t have heard it another five feet away. But surely they must be hearing me. My heart was reverberating in my ears like a riveter’s hammer. It was going about the same speed, too. And even if they couldn’t hear me they must surely have felt the vibrations being transmitted through my body and the ground, I was as near to them as that, a seismograph could have picked me up in Suva. But they heard nothing, they felt nothing. I lowered
myself back to the ground like a gambler laying down the last card that is going to lose him his fortune. I made a mental note that all this stuff about oxygen being necessary for life was a tale invented by the doctors. I had completely stopped breathing. My right hand ached, in the moonlight I could see the knuckles of the fist clenched round the hilt of the knife gleaming like burnished ivory. It took a conscious effort of will to relax the grip even slightly, but even so I still clung on to the handle of that knife harder than I’d ever clung on to anything before.

  Seven or eight aeons passed. By and by the three naval guards, who had that liberal interpretation of their duties possessed by naval guards the world over, disappeared. At least they seemed to disappear, until I realized that what I had taken for a dark patch in the ground behind them was really a hut. A minute passed, then I heard the metallic clacking and hissing of a primus stove being pumped into life. The bush in front of me moved again. I twisted the knife in my hand until the blade was pointing up, not down, but he didn’t come my way. He crawled off silently, parallel to the wire, heading for another bush about thirty yards away, and I could see that other bush stir as he approached. The place was full of moving bushes that night. I changed my mind about asking the guards what they were doing there. Another night, perhaps. Tonight, the wise man went to bed and thought about things. If I could get to my bed without being chewed to pieces by dogs or knifed by one of Hewel’s Chinese, I would think about things.

  I made it back to the house in one piece. It took me ninety minutes altogether, half of it to cover the first fifty yards, but I made it.

  It was coming on for five in the morning when I raised the corner of the seaward screen and slipped into the house. Marie was asleep, and there seemed to be no point in wakening her; bad news could wait. I washed off the bootblack in a basin in the corner of the room, but I was too tired to do anything about re-bandaging my arm. I was too tired even to think about things. I climbed into bed and had only the faintest recollection of my head touching the pillow. Even if I had had a dozen arms and each one throbbing with pain as was my left, I don’t think they would have kept me awake that night.