Wrath of the Lion sd-8

by Jack Higgins

  “I’ll expect to See you up here with your easel first thing in the morning.”

  “You’ll be disappointed. I always work from preliminary sketches, never from life.”

  She had moved a few feet away, stooping to pick up a flower, and now she turned quickly. “Fraud.”

  He took a small sketch-pad and pencil from the pocket of his corduroy jacket and dropped to the ground. “Stay where you are, but look out to sea.”

  She obeyed him at once. “All right, but this had better be good.”

  “Don’t chatter,” he said. “It distracts me.”

  The sun glinted on her straw-coloured hair and her image blurred so that in that one brief moment of time she might have been a painting by Renoir. She looked incredibly young and innocent and yet the wind from the sea moulded the thin cotton dress to her firm young figure with a disturbing sensuousness.

  Guyon grunted and pocketed his pencil. “All right.”

  She dropped beside him and snatched the pad from his hand. In the same moment her smile died and colour stained her cheeks. Inescapably caught in a few brief strokes of the pencil for all eternity, she stood gazing out to sea, and by some strange genius all that was good in her, all the innocence and longing of youth, were there also.

  She looked up at him in wonderment. “It’s beautiful.”

  “But you are,” he said calmly. “Has no one ever told you this before?”

  “I learned rather early in life that it’s dangerous to let them.” She smiled ruefully. “Until my mother died four years ago we lived in a villa near St. Tropez. You know it?”

  “Extremely well.”

  “In St. Tropez, in season, anything female is in demand and fourteen-year-old girls seem to have a strong appeal for some men.”

  “So I’ve heard,” he said gravely.

  “Yes, life had its difficulties, but then the General bought this little island and I went to school for a couple of years. I didn’t like that at all.”

  “What did you do, run away?”

  She pushed her long hair back from her face and laughed. “Persuaded the General to send me to a finishing school in Paris. Now that was really something.”

  Guyon grinned and lit a cigarette. “Tell me, why do you always call him General?”

  She shrugged. “Everyone does – except for Anne, of course. She’s special. When she married my brother Angus she was only my age. He was killed in Korea.”

  She paused, a few wild flowers held to her face as she stared pensively into the past, and Guyon lay back, gazing up at the sky, sadness sweeping through him as he remembered another time, another girl.

  Algiers, 1958. After five months chasing fellaghas in the cork forests of die Grande Kabylie he had found himself in that city of fear, leading his men through the narrow streets of the Kasbah and Bab el Oued, locked in the life-or-death struggle that was the Battle of Algiers.

  And then Nerida had come into his life, a young Moorish girl fleeing from a mob after a bomb outrage on the Boulevard du Telemly. He closed his eyes and saw again her dark hair tumbling across a pillow, moonlight streaming through a latticed window. The long nights when they had tried to forget tomorrow.

  But the morning had come, the cold grey morning when she had been found on the beach, stripped and defiled, head shaven, body mutilated. The proper ending for a woman who had betrayed her people for a Frangaoui. The sniper’s bullet of the following day which had sent him back to France on a stretcher had almost carried a welcome oblivion.

  Nerida. The scent of her was strong in his nostrils and he reached out and pulled her down, crushing his lips against hers. Her body was soft and yielding and when she swung on to her back her mouth answered sweet as honey. He opened his eyes and Fiona Grant smiled lazily up at him.

  “Now what brought that on?”

  He leaned on one elbow for a moment and rubbed a hand across his eyes. Tut it down to the sea air. I’m sorry.”

  Tin not.”

  “Then you should be.” He pulled her to her feet. “Didn’t you tell me you were expected for lunch?”

  She held on to his hand. “Come back with me. I’d like you to meet the General.”

  “Some other time. I’ve arranged to eat at the hotel.”

  She turned from him like a hurt child. He restrained a strong impulse to take her in his arms, reminded himself strongly that he had work to do – important work – and walked away. When he reached the top of the rise he hesitated and turned reluctantly.

  She was standing where he had left her, head drooping, something touchingly despondent about her. The strong sunlight, streaming through the thin cotton of her dress, outlined her firm young thighs perfectly.

  “Damn her!” he said softly to himself. “She might as well have nothing on.”

  He sighed heavily and went back down the slope.

  Mallory lay on his bunk in Foxhunter watching the blue smoke from his cigarette twist and swirl in the current from the air-conditioner. He’d had an excellent meal at the hotel in company with Owen Morgan, but there had been no sign of the Frenchman.

  His mind went back again to his meeting with Hamish Grant at the house on the cliffs. There had been method behind the old man’s bullying, of that he was certain. He had been a soldier himself for too long to subscribe to the opinion that all generals were rather stupid, dull-witted blimps who spent their time either needlessly sending men to their deaths or over-indulging at the table.

  Behind the worn, leather-coloured face, the half-blind eyes, was a will of iron and a first-rate brain. Iron Grant, who had force-marched his division through the hell that was the Qattara Depression rather than surrender to Rommel, who had led the way down the ramp of the first landing craft to hit Sword Beach on D-Day, was an adversary to be reckoned with by any standards.

  And then there was his daughter-in-law. Mallory closed his eyes, trying to picture her face. There was a calmness about her, a sureness that he found disturbing. Even on the wharf at Southampton she had not seemed afraid. It was as if life had done its worst, could do no more. As if nothing could ever really hurt her again. It came to him quite suddenly that she must have loved her husband very much and he was aware of a vague, irrational jealousy.

  He heard no sound and yet it was as if a wind had passed over his face and every muscle came alive and singing, ready for instant action. The lower step of the companionway creaked and he reached for the butt of the revolver under his pillow.

  “No need, my friend,” Raoul Guyon said quietly.

  As Mallory opened his eyes, the young Frenchman dropped on to the opposite bunk and produced a packet of cigarettes.

  “We missed you at lunch,” Mallory said. “What happened?”

  Guyon shrugged. “Something came up. You know how it is?”

  “I certainly do. There’s grass on your jacket.”

  “A fine day for lying on one’s back and contemplating heaven,” Guyon said brazenly.

  “Not when there’s a job to be done.” Mallory opened a cupboard under the bunk, took out a bottle of whisky and two glasses and set them on the table. “Business and pleasure don’t mix.”

  “On occasion, I’m happy to say that they do. Am I not supposed to be a fun-loving young artist on vacation?” Guyon poured himself a generous measure of whisky and raised his glass. “Sante.”

  Slim-hipped, lean and sinewy, Raoul Guyon possessed that strange quality to be found in the airborne troops of every country, a kind of arrogant self-sufficiency bred of the hazards of the calling. While unaware of this in himself, he recognised it at once in the Englishman, but there was more than that. Much more. Mallory was the same strange mixture of soldier and monk, of man-of-action and mystic, that he had seen in the great paratroop colonels in Algiers. Men like Philippe de Beaumont. Strange, wild, half-mad fanatics, marred by their experiences in the Viet prison camps, for the time controlling the destiny of a great nation.

  But Mallory also had passed through the fire of a Communist p
rison camp and, like Philippe de Beaumont, he had tried to put into practise those lessons hard learned from his Chinese taskmasters and with the same disastrous result.

  Mallory lit a cigarette and leaned back against the bulkhead. “How good is your skin-diving?”

  Guyon shrugged. “I know what I’m doing. A little out of practice, that’s all.”

  “Anne Grant wants me to take her out over the reef this afternoon. She’s brought a couple of aquamobiles back from the mainland. Wants to try them out. I thought if you asked Fiona nicely you might get yourself invited.”

  “As a matter of fact, I already have. All part of my business-cum-pleasure activities.”

  “You don’t waste much time.” Mallory grinned. “We’ll see how things look. We can make a full-scale reconnaissance later tonight.”

  "You really think there may be something in this business?”

  Mallory shrugged. “I wouldn’t like to say. As I was bringing the boat in this morning something damned big passed us underwater. Anne Grant said it was a shark. Apparently they’re pretty common round here.”

  “Do you think it’s worth reporting?”

  Mallory shook his head. “My boss is interested in facts, not possibilities. I’ve signalled my arrival and nothing more.” He opened the cupboard again, took out what was apparently a small transistor radio and held it up. “Amazing what they can do with electronics these days. There are three motor torpedo boats based on St. Helier now, supposed to be on shallow-water exercises. If I give them the word they’ll be in here like a shot.”

  “What’s the signal?”

  “Their codeword is Leviathan. When we need them we simply signal Code Four. That’s all that’s needed.”

  Mallory put the set in a drawer in the table and Guyon helped himself to more whisky. “I was in touch with my own people before I left Guernsey this morning. They’ve drawn a complete blank where L’Alouette is concerned. It’s creating something of a situation.”

  “What in the hell are the O.A.S. trying to prove?” Mallory said. “This sort of thing isn’t going to get them anywhere in the long run.”

  “Desperate men seek desperate remedies. Eight times since 1960 either the O.A.S. or the G.N.R. have conspired to kill de Gaulle. They came closest last month when they ambushed his car on the way to Villacoublay Airport. They picked the leader of that little affair up only last week.”

  “So this latest business is to prove to people they’re still a force to be reckoned with?”

  “More than that. That they have a long arm which can reach out to punish those who oppose them. This isn’t the first member of the judiciary to be assassinated. At this rate there will soon be no one willing to be connected with the trials of O.A.S. members, especially when to take part carries an automatic death sentence.”

  “What about Bouvier?”

  “He was public prosecutor at a military tribunal which only last month tried six members of the O.A.S. Two were sentenced to death. His execution was stage-managed to have the maximum dramatic effect and the government can’t hope to keep it secret beyond the end of the week.”

  “Which doesn’t give us long to handle things here.” Mallory frowned. “Have you ever met de Beaumont personally?”

  “Only as one of the crowd. He was a member of the original Committee of Public Safety which brought de Gaulle back to power. When it became obvious that the General wouldn’t play along with his dream of an integrated Algeria he fell to plotting, or so we think.”

  “Was anything ever proved against him?”

  Guyon shook his head. “It was thought that he was the power behind the scenes in General Chile’s abortive coup in 1961, but there was no evidence. Before any could be collected he asked to be placed on unpaid leave and left France. He’s extremely wealthy, by the way. One of his uncles married into industry after the first war.”

  “What does Legrande think about him?"

  Guyon laughed. “Legrande has little respect for the aristocracy. He would see the guillotine set up in the old situation and smile at the prospect. He has no proof that de Beaumont it directly connected with the O.A.S., but he is unhappy about him. He would be quite content to see him dead. He has a naturally tidy mind.”

  “And what’s your own opinion?”

  “Of de Beaumont?” Guyon hesitated. “He’s a dangerous man and no fool. For a year he was in charge of all military intelligence in Algeria, but he was always at loggerheads with the brasshats. He saw war as the Communists see war – as something to be won – and he believed that the end justified the means. Something the boi-dois had beaten into him in the Viet camps.” Guyon half smiled. “This much at least I would expect you to have in common with him. Legrande told me that you, too, were behind the Communist wire for a time.”

  “You make him sound interesting,” Mallory said. “I’d like to meet him. I’ve a feeling that would tell me all I need to know.1

  “Very possibly.” Guyon emptied his glass. “Is there anything else you wish me to do?”

  “This Frenchwoman who’s living at the hotel with Morgan, Juliette Vincente? In my briefing they said she was harmless. What do you think?”

  “Our preliminary report certainly didn’t indicate anything unusual. Her mother and father have a small farm in Normandy. One brother, killed doing his military service in Algeria in 1958. She worked at an hotel in St. Malo for six months before coming here.”

  Mallory nodded. “Sounds all right, but run the usual check on your room, just to make sure it hasn’t been searched.”

  Guyon put on his sun-glasses and got to his feet. “I’ll get changed. See you in about half an hour and we’ll have a look at that reef.5He paused in the doorway and stretched. “It really is a beautiful day. I’m quite looking forward to it.” After he had gone Mallory sat on the edge of the bunk going over things in his mind, trying to work out what might happen, but he knew that he was wasting his time.

  If there was one lesson he had learned above all others it was that in this game nothing was certain. Chance ruled every move. He opened one of the lockers, took out the diving gear and started to check it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ON THE REEF

  mallory vaulted over the rail into the translucent blue water, paused for a moment to adjust the flow of air from his aqualung and swam down in a long sweeping curve that brought him under the hull of Foxhunter to where Fiona Grant swayed beside the anchor chain like some exotic flower in her yellow diving suit. A moment later her sister-in-law appeared beside them in a cloud of silver bubbles.

  Fiona jack-knifed at once and followed the anchor chain down into the blue mist, her long hair streaming out behind, and Mallory and Anne went after her.

  They were perhaps a hundred yards out from the shore on the southern side of the island and the water was saturated with sunlight, so that even when they reached bottom at forty feet visibility was good.

  The sea-bed was covered by a great spreading forest of seaweed six or seven feet deep which moved rhythmically with every ebb and flow of current, changing colour like some living thing. Fiona swam into it, fish scattering to avoid her. Mallory paused, hovering over the undulating mass, and Anne tapped him on the shoulder and moved away.

  They plunged over a great black spine of rock and a wall complete with arched Norman window loomed out of the shadows a few feet to the right. Anne swam effortlessly through it and Mallory followed.

  It was obvious that only the strong tidal currents on this side of the island had prevented the building from being completely silted over centuries before. It had no roof and the walls had crumbled until they stood no higher than four feet above the sand. Beyond, the sea-bed sloped gently into another forest of seaweed, broken walls and jumbled blocks of worked masonry strewn on every side.

  Fiona Grant appeared from the gloom and swam towards them. She poised a couple of feet away, put a hand into the nylon bag which was looped to her left wrist and produced a piece of red pottery which she
waved triumphantly. Anne raised her thumb and they all turned, swam back across the rocks and struck upwards to Foxhunter’s curved hull.

  They surfaced by the small ladder suspended over the side, and Anne went up first. Mallory followed her, pulled off his mask and turned to give Fiona a hand. She squatted on the deck, taking the pieces of pottery from her bag one by one and laying them out carefully.

  Raoul Guyon had set up an easel next to the wheelhouse and was sketching Hamish Grant, who sat in the bows. The Frenchman put down his pencil and moved across to join them.

  The General turned his head sharply. “What’s going on?”

  “Fiona’s found some pottery,” Anne said.

  Guyon turned to Mallory, a strange, alien-looking figure in his webbed feet and black rubber suit. “What’s it like down there?”

  “Interesting,” Mallory said. “You should try it.”

  “Perhaps later. I’d like to get my sketches of the General finished and the light is just right.”

  Fiona unstrapped her aqualung, squatted down on the deck again and started to sort through the pieces of pottery, completely absorbed by her task.

  Anne turned to Mallory. “That’s the last we’ll see of her today.”

  “Do you want to go down again?”

  She shook her head. “I’d like to try out the aquamobiles. You take one and I’ll have the other. We’ll go round the point to the St. Pierre reef. I’ll show you the Middle Passage and there’s at least one interesting wreck.”

  Guyon helped Mallory bring the two aquamobiles up from the saloon. They were bullet-shaped underwater scooters driven by battery-operated propellers, designed to operate at depths of up to one hundred and fifty feet. They carried their own spotlights for use when visibility was bad.

  Anne and Mallory went over the side and Guyon passed down the heavy scooters. Anne moved away at once, running on the surface, and Mallory went after her.

  The sea was calm, the sun bright on the face of the water, but as they approached the great finger of rock jutting out into the sea at the western end of the island Mallory became aware of cross-currents tugging at his body. Anne raised an arm in a quick signal and disappeared.