‘Right, Mr. Gerastan.’ I started to explain to Bill, attempting to justify my actions to myself at the same time.
‘You’re a fool, Bill,’ I said. I went on to tell him all about Gerastan, his motives and his plans. I even told him how Gerastan had tried to have me killed in the aircraft crash, purely to keep him happy. Still he didn’t believe me.
But by then we were beginning to run out of time. The forward tilt of the aircraft was much more pronounced now, and I could hear the water slopping onto the flight deck from the open escape hatch used by the Captain.
’You realise, Katherine, that if the three of us rush you, you’ll never be able to kill us all? One of us is bound to get to you.’
‘You, Mr. Gerastan, I’ll shoot the moment you try to undo your safety belt,’ I said.
‘What about me, Katy?’ asked Bill, beginning to understand at last.
‘I’m sorry, you, too, Bill.’
But the Eunuch didn’t have a safety belt and he decided that he wasn’t going to wait around just to drown. He started to get to his feet slowly. I swung the barrel of the gun towards him, but his mind was made up. Both Gerastan and Bill watched him in hypnotised fascination as he started towards me. He didn’t rush, but came at me with a slow, measured tread. He looked like a tank bearing down on me and, for one brief moment, sheer terror paralysed me. Surely there wasn’t a bullet made that could stop this advancing monolith. In fact, one bullet didn’t. It took three, each one thudding into his great body with frightening impact. The first rocked him back on his heels; the second brought him to his knees. And still he continued towards me, crawling on all fours, his eyes black with hate; his lips drawn back over his teeth in an expression compounded of pain and superhuman effort. The third bullet killed him. It also killed Gerastan and Bill, too, in that they made no attempt to move after that. Gerastan offered me a million pounds, and Bill said he loved me. By now the water was around my knees and rising rapidly as the nose of the aircraft dipped lower. I stood watching the two men and they sat staring back at me. Time ceased to exist; every second took an hour; every minute took a day.
‘You know the rest,’ I told Mr. Blaser. ‘We were picked up from the raft four hours later, in response to the Captain’s Mayday signal. The DC-8 was long gone by then.’
’I suppose you know that the Captain and the co-pilot wanted to bring charges of piracy and murder against you,’ said Mr. Blaser.
‘Yes, sir. I thought they might.’
‘It took a great deal of persuasion to get them to change their ideas.’ I thought about the truculent, cocky co-pilot with a sore head.
‘It must have done,’ I said.
‘There is considerable tension between us and the Americans because of this whole disgraceful affair,’ said Mr. Blaser. That was his problem; at least he’d been saved the embarrassment of sending hatchet men onto foreign soil.
‘There will be a very full enquiry into the whole matter,’ he went on. He was being sour about the whole thing because that was his job, but I knew him well enough to know he was delighted at the way things had turned out. There had been no proof of Gerastan’s guilt and he had been spared the problem of manufacturing any. The world press had announced the unfortunate demise of that great industrial empire builder, Roger Gerastan, in an aeroplane crash, and the CIA would make sure the air crew kept their mouths shut until the crack of doom. It wouldn’t do their image any good to have it known that a foreign agent, or whatever, had taken the law into her own hands on their home ground. They weren’t even convinced of Gerastan’s complicity in the matter of information leakage, but there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.
‘Is that all, sir?’ I asked.
‘You tell me,’ said Mr. Blaser.
‘That’s all, sir,’ I said. He looked at me for a beat; then he nodded. Crafty old devil, he knew there was something I hadn’t told him. But it wasn’t going to alter things and he knew that, too. So he let it go.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘See Miss Moody on your way out. She’s worried about something to do with an extraordinary indent for five hundred dollars from your Chicago jaunt.’
I called my motor salesman that evening. It had been so long that he told me he thought I’d died or got married. We had a nice quiet evening together in a restaurant just off the King’s Road, and then we went back to his place.
I awoke in the middle of the night, struggling up from a dream of Bill. I knew then that if I ever thought about him in the future, it would have to be as I had first seen him, not as I had left him. Because no man is going to sit still and allow himself to be drowned, even if he is threatened with a gun. It becomes a case of six of one or half a dozen of the other. And I had miscalculated, as is sometimes my wont. When I had judged that the time was exactly right, and that he and Gerastan wouldn’t be able to reach their emergency exits, I had waded back onto the flight deck. It had been my intention to close and lock the flight deck door behind me. But, due to the water being chest high with the slope of the floor, I couldn’t budge the door, and Bill and Gerastan had come wading out behind me.
There had been no alternative, I’m afraid, and it is something I shall regret to the day I die. The only spark of hope in the whole thing is that Bill truly didn’t believe that I would do it, until it was too late. I had to shoot them both. My motor salesman calmed me down from my bad dream, and five minutes later I drifted off to sleep again.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jimmy Sangster was an acclaimed screenwriter (Curse of Frankenstein, Deadlier Than the Male, The Legacy, etc), director (Lust for a Vampire, Banacek, etc), TV writer (Wonder Woman, Cannon, BJ and The Bear, Kolchak, etc) and novelist. His many books include Touchfeather, Touchfeather Too, Blackball, Snowball, Hardball, private i and Foreign Exchange, all of which will be republished by Brash Books. He died in 2011.
Touchfeather Page 20
