The Dark Crusader

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Just wondering whether you might have changed your mind about your alleged ignorance on the subject of solid fuel.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Of course not. Hewell?’ The giant came forward and laid a squat leather-covered box on the floor – a tape recorder.

  ‘Perhaps you would care to hear the playback of a recent recording we made?’

  I rose slowly to my feet and stared down at Hargreaves. His gaze was still fixed on the floor.

  ‘Thank you, Hargreaves,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much indeed.’

  ‘I had to do it,’ he said dully. ‘LeClerc said he would shoot my wife through the back of the head.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I touched him on the shoulder. ‘It wasn’t your fault. What now, LeClerc?’

  ‘It’s time you saw the Dark Crusaders.’ He stood to one side to let me pass.

  The doors of the hangar were wide open, the lights burning high up near the roof. The rails ran all the way to the back of the hangar.

  They were there, all right, the Dark Crusaders, stubby pencil-shaped cylinders with highly polished steel sides and water-cooled porcelain noses above great scalloped air-scoops, the height of a two-storey house and perhaps four feet in diameter. They rested on flat eight-wheeled steel bogies, and on either side of each rocket was a gantry crane, almost as high as the rocket itself, each crane mounted on a four-wheeled bogie: from the top and bottom of the gantries protruding clamps reached out to hold the rockets firmly in position. Both rockets and all four gantries were resting on the same set of rails.

  LeClerc wasted no time, no words. He led me straight to the nearest rocket and mounted an open-sided lift fitted to the inner side of the nearest gantry. Hewell jabbed me painfully in the spine with his gun: I got the idea and climbed up beside LeClerc. Hewell stayed where he was. LeClerc pressed a button, an electric motor whined and the lift slid easily upwards for about five feet. LeClerc took a key from his pocket, slid it into a tiny hole in the side of the rocket, pulled out a flush-fitting handle and swung out a seven-foot-high door in the casing of the Dark Crusader: the door had been so meticulously machined, so beautifully fitted, that I hadn’t even noticed its existence.

  ‘Take a good look,’ LeClerc said. ‘That’s all you’re here for – to take a good look.’

  I took a good look. The outer hardened steel casing of the rocket was just that and no more – an outer case. Inside was another casing and the gap between the two was at least five inches.

  Directly opposite me, welded on to the inner casing, were two flat steel boxes, about six inches apart and each six inches square. The one to the left, green-painted, bore the legend ‘Propellant’ and below that the words ‘On-Off’: the one to the right was a bright pillar-box red in colour, with the words ‘Safe’ and ‘Armed’ stencilled in white on the left and right side of the box respectively. On both boxes, just below the top, was a knob-handled switch.

  From the foot of both boxes issued flexible armoured cables, with plastic sheathing below the armour – a measure almost certainly designed to protect the underlying electric cables from the tremendous heat which would be generated in flight. The cable to the left, coming from the box marked ‘Propellant’ was almost an inch and a half in diameter,’ the other was half an inch in diameter. The former ran down the inner casing and, about three feet away from the box, split into seven separate cables, each one covered in the same plastic and armour; the latter crossed the gap to the outer casing and disappeared upwards out of sight.

  There were two other cables. One, a small half-inch cable, joined the two boxes: the second, two inches in diameter, bridged the gap between the ‘Propellant’ box and a third box, larger than either of the two, which was fitted to the inside of the outer wall. This third box had a hinged door facing me, secured by a couple of butterfly nuts: no other electric cables led either to or from it.

  And that was all there was to be seen. I saw it all in ten seconds. LeClerc looked at me and said: ‘Got it?’

  I nodded and said nothing.

  ‘The photographic memory,’ he murmured cryptically. He closed the door, locked it, pressed the lift button and we hummed upwards again for about six feet. Once more the routine with the key, the opening of a door – much smaller this time, barely two feet in height, the invitation to inspect.

  This time there was even less to see. A circular gap in the inner casing, a view beyond the gap of what appeared to be fifteen or twenty round pipes narrowing towards their tips and, in the centre of those pipes, the top of some cylindrical object, about six inches in diameter, which vanished down among the tubes. In the centre of the top of this cylinder was a small hole, less than half an inch across. Attached to the outer casing was an armoured cable of the same dimensions as the one which had issued from the box marked ‘Safe’ and ‘Armed’, and it seemed a pretty fair guess that it was the same cable. The end of this cable, which was tipped with a solid copper plug, bent right over and hung slackly downwards in the gap between the outer and inner casings. It seemed logical to suppose that this copper plug was intended to fit into the hole in the central cylinder but here, it would seem, logic would have been in error: the hole in the cylinder was at least four times the size of the narrow copper plug.

  LeClerc closed the door, pressed the button, and the lift dropped down to the foot of the gantry. Another door, another key and this time a view of the very base of the rocket, a foot below where the last of the pipes in the inner casing ended. There was no impression of a confusion of pipes here as there had been at the top: everything was mathematically neat and completely symmetrical, nineteen cylinders all of which seemed to be sealed with a heavy plastic compound, each cylinder about seven inches in diameter, eighteen of them arranged in two concentric circles about an inner core. The cylinders, which completely filled the inner casing, were not entirely smooth-sided: at various distances above their lower ends they were smoothly indented in their sides, and those indentations, it was no trick at all to guess, were for the purpose of introducing the leads which hung in an untidy bunch between the two casings. I counted the leads, nineteen in all, breaking out from the seven armoured cables leading from the ‘Propellant’ box above: a pair of leads from each of three cables, three leads from each of other three cables and four leads from the remaining cable.

  ‘You have it all, Bentall?’ LeClerc asked.

  ‘I have it all.’ I nodded. It seemed simple enough.

  ‘Good.’ He closed the door, led the way towards the hangar entrance. ‘Now to have a look at Fairfield’s notebooks, codes and references. At least we were able to save those.’

  I raised an eyebrow – it was one of the few muscular exercises I could perform without causing myself pain.

  ‘There are some things you couldn’t save?’

  ‘The complete set of blue-prints for the rocket. I must confess we did not think that the British would have had the intelligence to take such precautions. They were in the lower half of a sealed metal box – a standard war-time device, much faster and more foolproof than burning – the top half of which was a glass tank of concentrated hydrochloric with a metal plunger. The plunger was depressed, the glass broken and the acid released before we realized what was happening.’

  I remembered the captain’s bleeding and battered face.

  ‘Good old Captain Griffiths. So now you’re completely dependent on having a working model of the rocket, eh?’

  ‘That’s so.’ If LeClerc was worried, he didn’t show it. ‘Don’t forget we still have the scientists.’

  He led me to a hut beyond the armoury, a hut rather primitively fitted out as an office, with filing cabinets, a typewriter and a plain wooden desk. LeClerc opened the cabinet, pulled out the top drawer and dumped a pile of papers on the table.

  ‘I understand that those are Fairfield’s papers, all of them. I’ll come back in an hour.’

  ‘Two hours at
least: probably more.’

  ‘I said an hour.’

  ‘All right.’ I rose from the chair where I’d just seated myself and pushed the papers to one side. ‘Get someone else to work the damn thing out.’

  He looked at me for a long moment, the slaty milky eyes without expression, then he said evenly: ‘You take very many chances, Bentall.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish.’ If I couldn’t do anything else I could at least sneer at him. ‘When a man takes chances he can either win or lose. I can’t possibly win anything now, and God knows I’ve nothing to lose.’

  ‘You’re wrong, you know,’ he said pleasantly. ‘There is something you can lose. I can take your life away from you.’

  ‘Have it and welcome.’ I tried to ease the burning pain in my shoulder and arm. ‘The way I feel right now I’m just about finished with it anyway.’

  ‘You have a remarkable sense of humour,’ he said acidly. Then he was gone, banging the door shut behind him. He didn’t forget to turn the key in the lock.

  Half an hour passed before I even bothered looking at Fairfield’s papers, I’d more important things to think about than those. It was not the most pleasant half-hour of my life. The evidence was all before me now, Bentall with the blinkers off – at last – and I knew the truth, also at last. Counter-espionage, I thought bitterly, they should never have let me out of the kindergarten, the wicked world and its wicked ways were far too much for Bentall, if he could put one foot in front of the other without breaking an ankle in the process that was all you could reasonably expect of him. On flat ground, of course. By the time I’d finished thinking my morale and self-respect had shrunk so much you’d have required an electronic microscope to find them, so I reviewed all that had happened in the hope of discovering one instance where I had been right, but no, I had a perfect and completely unmarred record, one hundred per cent wrong all along the line. It was a feat that not many people could have matched.

  The one redeeming feature about being utterly wrong, of course, was that I’d also been wrong about Marie Hopeman. She had had no special instructions from Colonel Raine, she had never fooled me once. This was no mere hunch or opinion, it was a provable certainty. It was, I knew, rather late in the day to arrive at this knowledge, I couldn’t see that it was going to alter anything now, but in different circumstances… I gave myself up to the very pleasant contemplation of what things might have been like in different circumstances and was just finishing off the towers and battlements of a particularly enchanting dream castle in the air when a key turned in the lock. I’d barely time to open the folder and scatter a few papers around before LeClerc and a Chinese guard came in. He glanced down at the table, malacca cane swinging idly in his hand.

  ‘How is it coming, Bentall?’

  ‘Very difficult and very complicated and continual interruptions by you don’t help me any.’

  ‘Don’t make it too difficult, Bentall. I want this test rocket wired and fused and ready to take off in two and a half hours.’

  ‘Your wants are a matter of complete indifference to me.’ I said nastily. ‘What’s the hurry, anyway?’

  ‘The Navy is waiting, Bentall. We mustn’t keep the Navy waiting, must we?’

  I thought this one over then said: ‘Do you mean to tell me that you have the colossal effrontery to keep in radio touch with the Neckar?’

  ‘Don’t be so naïve. Of course we’re in touch. There’s no one more interested than myself to have the Dark Crusader land on time, on target. Apart from which, the one sure way to rouse their suspicions and send them steaming back at high speed to Vardu is not to keep in touch with them. So hurry it up.’

  ‘I’m doing my best,’ I said coldly.

  When he left, I got down to working out the firing circuits. Apart from the fact that they were coded, the instructions for the wiring were such as could have been carried out by any reasonably competent electrician. What could not have been done by the electrician was the calculation of the settings on the time clock – part of the mechanism in the box attached to the inside of the outer casing – which regulated the ignition of the nineteen propellant cylinders in their proper sequence.

  From his notes it appeared that even Fairfield himself had been doubtful about the accuracy of his own recommendations as to firing sequences and times: they had been worked out on a purely theoretical basis, but theory and practice weren’t the same things at all. The trouble lay in the nature of the solid fuel propellant itself. A completely stable mixture in limited quantities and at normal temperatures, it became highly unstable under extremes of heat and pressure and beyond a certain unknown critical mass: the trouble was that no-one knew the precise limits of any of those factors, nor, even more worrying, did they know how they reacted upon one another. What was known as the highly lethal results of instability: when the safety limit was passed, the fuel changed from a relatively slow burning propellant to an instantaneously explosive disruptive estimated, weight for weight, at five times the power of T.N.T.

  It was to reduce the danger of mass that the propellant had been fitted in nineteen separate charges and it was to reduce the danger of too suddenly applied pressure that the charges had been arranged to ignite in seven consecutive stages: but, unfortunately, no one could do anything about the danger of heat. The propellant had its own in-built oxidizing agent, but not nearly enough to ensure complete combustion: two high-speed turbine fans which started up two seconds before the ignition of the first four cylinders supplied air in quantity and under high pressure for the first fifteen seconds until the missile reached a high enough speed to supply itself with sufficient air through its giant air-scoops. But as the Dark Crusader was absolutely dependent on its air supply, it meant that it had to leave the earth on a very flat trajectory indeed in order not to run out of atmosphere before the propellant burnt out: it was not until all the fuel was consumed that the missile’s automatic brain lifted it sharply out of the atmosphere. But the need for even half a minute’s supply of air meant a tremendous air resistance generating extremely high temperatures and while it was hoped that the water-cooled porcelain nose would cope with part of the heat, no one knew what temperature would be generated in the heart of the rocket. All in all, I thought, it looked like a very dicey deal indeed.

  The two switch-boxes I’d seen attached to the inner casing had both to be set before firing – the ‘On’ switch closed the firing circuits, the ‘Armed’ switch closed the circuit for the suicide box: if anything went wrong with the rocket in flight, such as a deviation to land or shipping lanes, it could be electronically instructed to commit suicide. In normal missiles fuelled by lox and kerosene, the flight could be stopped simply by sending out a radio message that automatically cut off the fuel supply: but there was no way of shutting off a solid fuel already in combustion. The cylinder I had seen in the middle of the propellant at the top of the rocket had been a sixty-pound charge of T.N.T., fitted with a primer, and the hole I had seen in the centre of the primer was to accommodate a seventyseven grain electrically fired fulminate of mercury detonator, which was connected to the cable I’d seen dangling in the vicinity. The circuit for this was triggered, as were all controls in the rocket, by radio, a certain signal on a certain wave-length activating an electrical circuit in the same box as the one that contained the timing mechanism for the firing circuits: this current passed through a coil which in turn activated a solenoid switch – a soft iron core in the centre of the coil – and this completed the circuit which fired the detonator in the T.N.T. charge. Again Fairfield had been very doubtful of the outcome: what was intended was that the explosion of the T.N.T. should disintegrate the rocket: but it was just as likely, he had thought, that the instantaneous change in heat and pressure would cause the whole rocket to blow up in sympathetic detonation.

  If I was picked as the first man to go to the moon, I thought, I’d just as soon not travel on the Dark Crusader. Let someone else go first while Bentall remained earthbound and watch
ed for the explosion.

  I reached for the typewriter, made a list of which coloured and numbered firing cables marked which fuel cylinders, worked out an average of Fairfield’s suggested figures for the timing sequences and stuck the paper in my pocket. I’d just done this when Hewell appeared.

  ‘No, I’m damned well not finished,’ I said before he could open his mouth. ‘Why don’t you leave me alone to get on with it?’

  ‘How much longer?’ he asked in his rumbling gravelly voice. ’We’re getting impatient, Bentall.’

  ‘I’m worried stiff. Maybe fifteen minutes. Leave one of your men outside and I’ll knock when I’m finished.’

  He nodded and left. I got to thinking some more, mainly about myself and my life expectancy and then I started thinking of the psychologists who speak of the tremendous power of the human mind, the power of positive thinking, and if you say to yourself a thousand times a day to be cheerful and optimistic and healthy, then you will end up that way and I tried it with a slight variation, I tried to see Bentall as a bent old man with silver hair but somehow the positive thinking didn’t seem to work in my case, I couldn’t see anything of the kind, all I could see was Bentall with a hole in the back of his head. Tonight, it would probably come tonight, but the one certain thing I knew was that it would come. The other scientists could live, but not me: I had to die, and I knew why. I got up and tore the cord from the window blind, but not with the idea of hanging myself before LeClerc and Hewell got round to torturing me to death or shooting me. I rolled the cord into a coil, stuck it in my hip pocket and knocked on the door. I heard the footsteps of the guard walking away.

  A few minutes later the door opened again, this time both LeClerc and Hewell were there, accompanied by a couple of Chinese.

  ‘Finished?’ LeClerc asked abruptly.

  ‘Finished.’

  ‘Right. Start wiring up right away.’ No thank yous, no congratulations for Bental’s keen-witted intelligence in solving an abstruse problem. Just get started right away.