When Eight Bells Toll

by Alistair MacLean

  And I had sent them to their deaths. Not willingly, not knowingly, but the ultimate responsibility had been mine. This had all been my idea, my brain-child and mine alone, and I’d overridden all objections and fast-talked our very doubtful and highly sceptical chief into giving if not his enthusiastic approval at least his grudging consent. I’d told the two men, Baker and Delmont, that if they played it my way no harm would come to them so they’d trusted me blindly and played it my way and now they lay dead beside me. No hesitation, gentlemen, put your faith in me, only see to it that you make your wills first of all.

  There was nothing more to be done here now.

  I’d sent two men to their deaths and that couldn’t be undone. It was time to be gone.

  I opened that outer door the way you’d open the door to a cellar you knew to be full of cobras and black widow spiders. The way you would open the door, that is: were cobras and black widow spiders all I had to contend with aboard that ship, I’d have gone through that door without a second thought, they were harmless and almost lovable little creatures compared to some specimens of homo sapiens that were loose on the decks of the freighter Nantesville that night.

  With the door opened at its fullest extent I just stood there. I stood there for a long time without moving a muscle of body or limbs, breathing shallowly and evenly, and when you stand like that even a minute seems half a lifetime. All my being was in my ears. I just stood there and listened. I could hear the slap of waves against the hull, the occasional low metallic rumble as the Nantesville worked against wind and tide on its moorings, the low moan of the strengthening night wind in the rigging and, once, the far-off lonely call of a curlew. Lonesome sounds, safe sounds, sounds of the night and nature. Not the sounds I was listening for. Gradually, these sounds too became part of the silence. Foreign sounds, sounds of stealth and menace and danger, there were none. No sound of breathing, no slightest scrape of feet on steel decks, no rustle of clothing, nothing. If there was anyone waiting out there he was possessed of a patience and immobility that was superhuman and I wasn’t worried about superhumans that night, just about humans, humans with knives and guns and chisels in their hands. Silently I stepped out over the storm sill.

  I’ve never paddled along the night-time Orinoco in a dug-out canoe and had a thirty-foot anaconda drop from a tree, wrap a coil around my neck and start constricting me to death and what’s more I don’t have to go there now to describe the experience for I know exactly what it feels like. The sheer animal power, the feral ferocity of the pair of huge hands that closed round my neck from behind was terrifying, something I’d never known of, never dreamed of. After the first moment of blind panic and shocked paralysis, there was only one thought in my mind: it comes to us all and now it has come to me, someone who is cleverer and stronger and more ruthless than I am.

  I lashed back with all the power of my right foot but the man behind me knew every rule in the book. His own right foot, travelling with even more speed and power than mine, smashed into the back of my swinging leg. It wasn’t a man behind me, it was a centaur and he was shod with the biggest set of horseshoes I’d ever come across. My leg didn’t just feel as if it had been broken, it felt as if it had been cut in half. I felt his left toe behind my left foot and stamped on it with every vicious ounce of power left me but when my foot came down his toe wasn’t there any more. All I had on my feet was a pair of thin rubber swimming moccasins and the agonising jar from the steel deck plates shot clear to the top of my head. I reached up my hands to break his little fingers but he knew all about that too for his hands were clenched into iron-hard balls with the second knuckle grinding into the carotid artery. I wasn’t the first man he’d strangled and unless I did something pretty quickly I wasn’t going to be the last either. In my ears I could hear the hiss of compressed air escaping under high pressure and behind my eyes the shooting lines and flashes of colour were deepening and brightening by the moment.

  What saved me in those first few seconds were the folded hood and thick rubberised canvas neck ruff of the scuba suit I was wearing under my coat. But it wasn’t going to save me many seconds longer, the life’s ambition of the character behind me seemed to be to make his knuckles meet in the middle of my neck. With the progress he was making that wouldn’t take him too long, he was half-way there already.

  I bent forward in a convulsive jerk. Half of his weight came on my back, that throttling grip not easing a fraction, and at the same time he moved his feet as far backwards as possible – the instinctive reaction to my move, he would have thought that I was making a grab for one of his legs. When I had him momentarily off-balance I swung round in a short arc till both our backs were towards the sea. I thrust backwards with all my strength, one, two, three steps, accelerating all the way. The Nantesville didn’t boast of any fancy teak guard-rails, just small-section chain, and the small of the strangler’s back took our combined charging weights on the top chain.

  If I’d taken that impact I’d have broken my back or slipped enough discs to keep an orthopædic surgeon in steady employment for months. But no shouts of agony from this lad. No gasps, even. Not a whisper of sound. Maybe he was a deaf mute – I’d heard of several deaf mutes possessed of this phenomenal strength, part of nature’s compensatory process, I suppose.

  But he’d been forced to break his grip, to grab swiftly at the upper chain to save us both from toppling over the side into the cold dark waters of Loch Houron. I thrust myself away and spun round to face him, my back against the radio office bulkhead. I needed that bulkhead, too -any support while my swimming head cleared and a semblance of life came back into my numbed right leg.

  I could see him now as he straightened up from the guardrail. Not clearly – it was too dark for that – but I could see the white blur of face and hands and the general outline of his body.

  I’d expected some towering giant of a man, but he was no giant – unless my eyes weren’t focusing properly, which was likely enough. From what I could see in the gloom he seemed a compact and well enough made figure, but that was all. He wasn’t even as big as I was. Not that that meant a thing – George Hackenschmidt was a mere five foot nine and a paltry fourteen stone when he used to throw the Terrible Turk through the air like a football and prance around the training ring with eight hundred pounds of cement strapped to his back just to keep him in trim. I had no compunction or false pride about running from a smaller man and as far as this character was concerned the farther and faster the better. But not yet. My right leg wasn’t up to it. I reached my hand behind my neck and brought the knife down, holding it in front of me, the blade in the palm of my hand so that he couldn’t see the sheen of steel in the faint starlight.

  He came at me calmly and purposefully, like a man who knew exactly what he intended to do and was in no doubt at all as to the outcome of his intended action. God knows I didn’t doubt he had reason enough for his confidence. He came at me sideways so that my foot couldn’t damage him, with his right hand extended at the full stretch of his arm. A one track mind. He was going for my throat again. I waited till his hand was inches from my face then jerked my own right hand violently upwards. Our hands smacked solidly together as the blade sliced cleanly through the centre of his palm.

  He wasn’t a deaf mute after all. Three short unprintable words, an unjustified slur on my ancestry, and he stepped quickly backwards, rubbed the back and front of his hand against his clothes then licked it in a queer animal-like gesture. He peered closely at the blood, black as ink in the starlight, welling from both sides of his hand.

  ‘So the little man has a little knife, has he?’ he said softly. The voice was a shock. With this caveman-like strength I’d have expected a cavemanlike intelligence and voice to match, but the words came in the calm, pleasant, cultured almost accentless speech of the well-educated southern Englishman. ‘We shall have to take the little knife from him, shan’t we?’ He raised his voice. ‘Captain Imrie?’ At least, that’s what the name sounded
like.

  ‘Be quiet, you fool!’ The urgent irate voice came from the direction of the crew accommodation aft. ‘Do you want to –’

  ‘Don’t worry, Captain.’ The eyes didn’t leave me. ‘I have him. Here by the wireless office. He’s armed. A knife. I’m just going to take it away from him.’

  ‘You have him? You have him? Good, good, good!’ It was the kind of a voice a man uses when he’s smacking his lips and rubbing his hands together: it was also the kind of voice that a German or Austrian uses when he speaks English. The short guttural ‘gut’ was unmistakable. ‘Be careful. This one I want alive. Jacques! Henry! Kramer! All of you. Quickly! The bridge. Wireless office.’

  ‘Alive,’ the man opposite me said pleasantly, ‘can also mean not quite dead.’ He sucked some more blood from the palm of his hand. ‘Or will you hand over the knife quietly and peaceably? I would suggest –’

  I didn’t wait for more. This was an old technique. You talked to an opponent who courteously waited to hear you out, not appreciating that half-way through some well-turned phrase you were going to shoot him through the middle when, lulled into a sense of temporary false security, he least expected it. Not quite cricket, but effective, and I wasn’t going to wait until it took effect on me. I didn’t know how he was coming at me but I guessed it would be a dive, either head or feet first and that if he got me down on the deck I wouldn’t be getting up again. Not without assistance. I took a quick step forward, flashed my torch a foot from his face, saw the dazzled eyes screw shut for the only fraction of time I’d ever have and kicked him.

  It wasn’t as hard as it might have been, owing to the fact that my right leg still felt as if it were broken, nor as accurate, because of the darkness, but it was a pretty creditable effort in the circumstances and it should have left him rolling and writhing about the deck, whooping in agony. Instead he just stood there, unable to move, bent forward and clutching himself with his hands. He was more than human, all right. I could see the sheen of his eyes, but I couldn’t see the expression in them, which was just as well as I don’t think I would have cared for it very much.

  I left. I remembered a gorilla I’d once seen in Basle Zoo, a big black monster who used to twist heavy truck tyres into figures of eight for light exercise. I’d as soon have stepped inside that cage as stay around that deck when this lad became more like his old self again. I hobbled forward round the corner of the radio office, climbed up a liferaft and stretched myself flat on the deck.

  The nearest running figures, some with torches, were already at the foot of the companionway leading up to the bridge. I had to get right aft to the rope with the rubber-covered hook I’d swung up to swarm aboard. But I couldn’t do it until the midship decks were clear. And then, suddenly, I couldn’t do it all: now that the need for secrecy and stealth was over someone had switched on the cargo loading lights and the midships and foredecks were bathed in a brilliant dazzle of white. One of the foredeck arc lamps was on a jumbo mast, just for’ard of and well above where I was lying. I felt as exposed as a fly pinned to a white ceiling. I flattened myself on that deck as if I were trying to push myself through it.

  They were up the companion way and by the radio office now. I heard the sudden exclamations and curses and knew they’d found the hurt man:

  I didn’t hear his voice so I assumed he wasn’t able to speak yet.

  The curt, authoritative German-accented voice took command.

  ‘You cackle like a flock of hens. Be silent. Jacques, you have your machine-pistol?’

  ‘I have my pistol, Captain.’ Jacques had the quiet competent sort of voice that I would have found reassuring in certain circumstances but didn’t very much care for in the present ones.

  ‘Go aft. Stand at the entrance to the saloon and face for’ard. Cover the midships decks. We will go to the fo’c’sle and then come aft in line abreast and drive him to you. If he doesn’t surrender to you, shoot him through the legs. I want him alive.’

  God, this was worse than the Peacemaker Colt. At least that fired only one shot at a time. I’d no idea what kind of machine-pistol Jacques had, probably it fired bursts of a dozen or more. I could feel my right thigh muscle begin to stiffen again, it was becoming almost a reflex action now.

  ‘And if he jumps over the side, sir?’

  ‘Do I have to tell you, Jacques?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  I was just as clever as Jacques was. He didn’t have to tell me either. That nasty dry taste was back in my throat and mouth again. I’d a minute left, no more, and then it would be too late. I slid silently to the side of the radio office roof, the starboard side, the side remote from the spot where Captain Imrie was issuing curt instructions to his men, lowered myself soundlessly to the deck and made my way to the wheelhouse.

  I didn’t need my torch in there, the backwash of light from the big arc-lamps gave me all the illumination I wanted. Crouching down, to keep below window level, I looked around and saw what I wanted right away – a metal box of distress flares.

  Two quick flicks of the knife severed the lashings that secured the flare-box to the deck. One piece of rope, perhaps ten feet in all, I left secured to a handle of the box. I pulled a plastic bag from the pocket of my coat, tore off the coat and the yachtsman’s rubber trousers that I was wearing over my scuba suit, stuffed them inside and secured the bag to my waist. The coat and trousers had been essential. A figure in a dripping rubber diving suit walking across the decks of the Nantesville would hardly have been likely to escape comment whereas in the dusk and with the outer clothing I had on I could have passed for a crewman and, indeed, had done so twice at a distance: equally important, when I’d left the port of Torbay in my rubber dinghy it had been broad daylight and the sight of a scubaclad figure putting to sea towards evening wouldn’t have escaped comment either, as the curiosity factor of the inhabitants of the smaller ports of the Western Highlands and Islands did not, I had discovered, lag noticeably behind that of their mainland brethren. Some would put it even more strongly than that.

  Still crouching low, I moved out through the wheelhouse door on to the starboard wing of the bridge. I reached the outer end and stood up straight. I had to, I had to take the risk, it was now or never at all, I could hear the crew already beginning to move forward to start their search. I lifted the flare-box over the side eased it down the full length of the rope and started to swing it slowly, gently, from side to side, like a leadsman preparing to cast his lead.

  The box weighed at least forty pounds, but I barely noticed the weight. The pendulum arc increased with every swing I made. It had reached an angle of about forty-five degrees on each swing now, pretty close to the maximum I could get and both time and my luck must be running out, I felt about as conspicuous as a trapeze artist under a dozen spotlights and just about as vulnerable too. As the box swung aft on its last arc I gave the rope a final thrust to achieve all the distance and momentum I could, opened my hands at the extremity of the arc and dropped down behind the canvas winddodger. It was as I dropped that I remembered I hadn’t holed the damned box, I had no idea whether it would float or sink but I did have a very clear idea of what would happen to me if it didn’t sink. One thing for sure, it was too late to worry about it now.

  I heard a shout come from the main deck, some twenty or thirty feet aft of the bridge. I was certain I had been seen but I hadn’t. A second after the shout came a loud and very satisfactory splash and a voice I recognised as Jacques’s shouting: ‘He’s gone over the side. Starboard abaft the bridge. A torch quick!’ He must have been walking aft as ordered, seen this dark blur falling, heard the splash and come on the inevitable conclusion. A dangerous customer who thought fast, was Jacques. In three seconds he’d told his mates all they required to know: what had happened, where and what he wanted done as the necessary preliminary to shooting me full of holes.

  The men who had been moving forward to start the sweep for me now came running aft, pounding along the deck directly
beneath where I was crouching on the wing of the bridge.

  ‘Can you see him, Jacques?’ Captain Imrie’s voice, very quick, very calm.

  ‘Not yet, sir.’

  ‘He’ll be up soon.’ I wished he wouldn’t sound so damned confident. ‘A dive like that must have knocked most of the breath out of him. Kramer, two men and into the boat. Take lamps and circle around. Henry, the box of grenades. Carlo, the bridge, quick. Starboard searchlight.’

  I’d never thought of the boat, that was bad enough, but the grenades! I felt chilled. I knew what an underwater explosion, even a small explosion, can do to the human body, it was twenty times as deadly as the same explosion on land. And I had to, I just had to, be in that water in minutes. But at least I could do something about that searchlight, it was only two feet above my head. I had the power cable in my left hand, the knife in my right and had just brought the two into contact when my mind stopped thinking about those damned grenades and started working again. Cutting that cable would be about as clever as leaning over the wind-dodger and yelling ‘Here I am, come and catch me’ – a dead giveaway that I was still on board. Clobbering Carlo from behind as he came up the ladder would have the same effect. And I couldn’t fool them twice. Not people like these. Hobbling as fast as I could I passed through the wheelhouse on to the port wing, slid down the ladder and ran towards the forepeak. The foredeck was deserted.