Domino Island

by Desmond Bagley

  Haslam said, ‘Hanna gave us fifteen minutes. The time’s nearly up.’

  ‘He won’t do a thing while we hold those passengers,’ argued Frank. ‘Especially not at night, and especially if we tell him the score. I say we hold out and see what daybreak brings. Who’s with me on that, at least?’

  They were badly confused but they grabbed at that one. At least it was a concrete suggestion, and Frank was probably right about calling Hanna’s bluff. I said, ‘I’ll go down and tell Hanna.’

  ‘You stay right where you are, buster.’ Frank’s pistol pointed directly at me. ‘Bruno, you and Terry go down and put it straight to that cop. Tell him we have a bomb on board the Boeing and if he tries anything, we blow the goddamn thing sky high, passengers and all. That’ll stop him.’

  If it was true, it would indeed stop Hanna in his tracks. It was the perfect stand-off.

  Frank said, ‘We might as well use the time sensibly.’ He pointed at Haslam and Philips. ‘Get back to loading the bags onto the plane.’

  The gang broke up and he glared at me. ‘You I want to talk to. Come here!’

  I walked past Philips and Haslam as they set to work manhandling bags, and went over to where Frank stood between the Lear and the back wall of the hangar. ‘What other tricks have the cops got?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘But you knew about those armoured trucks.’

  ‘He didn’t have them when I came up here.’

  Frank said, ‘But you knew they were coming.’

  ‘Hanna may have mentioned them.’ I didn’t like where this was going.

  ‘And you didn’t tell me,’ said Frank.

  ‘It slipped my mind,’ I said. Instinctively, I backed up against the wall. My brain was working furiously, trying to find a solution to the conundrum I was confronted with: how to extricate a hundred hostages from a potentially deadly impasse. With no weapon and no leverage. On the face of it, my best shot was to hope they’d lump me in with Leotta and the hostages and let the police negotiators get on with their job.

  I looked at the gun Frank was waving around and I didn’t like that option much. Especially if he hadn’t been lying about a bomb on board the Boeing.

  ‘Don’t get smart with me,’ said Frank. ‘Now, I’m asking you again. What other tricks can we expect?’

  ‘The usual, I suppose. Tear gas, perhaps. Those riot trucks have water cannon.’

  Frank thought about it and shook his head. ‘They won’t risk it,’ he decided.

  I put my hand in my pocket, trying to look more nonchalant than I felt, and my fingers closed round the pack of fat American cigarettes I’d been smoking while I was on the island. ‘Mind if I smoke?’ I asked casually.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Kemp. You heard what Haslam said. Now, think very carefully. Is there anything else that might have slipped your mind?’

  I sighed. ‘He has the army out there. They have at least one machine-gun and one mortar – you know that already. They have automatic rifles and submachine-guns. And they’ll probably have other things that go with an army.’

  ‘None of which they dare use,’ said Frank with satisfaction. ‘But I’m telling you, if they come up with some gimmick you haven’t told me about, then you’re dead.’

  Frank took half a step towards me, brandishing his pistol, and for one mad moment I considered trying to jump him. Then something moved in my peripheral vision and I unclenched the fist I’d made in my pocket.

  I’d assumed the movement I’d noticed was Slim coming in from outside. I was wrong. When I glanced over Frank’s shoulder towards the hangar door, my insides lurched into my throat. The tractor was trundling, driverless, across the hangar towards us, a piece of ice-blue fabric dangling from its open petrol cap. Even at that distance, I could see that the fabric was alight.

  In the open hangar doorway, I saw Leotta, stony-faced, with David Salton’s inscribed cigarette lighter in her hand.

  Frank must have spotted the horror in my eyes because he span round to see what I was looking at. In the instant he took his attention off me I dived. I heard his gun go off and something plucked at my shoulder. I was behind the Lear when the tractor’s petrol tank exploded but Frank got the full force of it.

  I rolled underneath the plane and then scrambled desperately to my feet, not caring where Haslam and Philips might be. I caught a glimpse of a great bloom of flame with Frank in the heart of it, and I felt a wave of heat propelling me towards the hangar door. As I sprinted away, the fireball enveloped the nose of the Lear, and streamers of flame ran along the starboard wing.

  Then I was out of the hangar and running for the darkness. Someone shot at me but the bullet went wide and I heard Leotta shouting my name, away to my right. I veered towards the sound and finally flung myself flat on the ground beside her.

  There was a dull thud as the Lear went up and I looked back. A wall of flame thundered out of the hangar door. It boiled out for perhaps a hundred feet and then licked towards the sky, and the whole airfield was lit up as though a giant photographer had set off a massive flash gun.

  Haslam had been right about the dangerous properties of avgas.

  Hanna found us still sitting on the ground. I was rubbing a bullet burn on my shoulder. Leotta’s trouser suit was destroyed where she’d torn off a leg to create the makeshift fuse for her bomb. The runway was alive with police and troops and already the passengers were being taken from the Boeing and shepherded away. Hanna looked down at me and said, ‘What happened?’

  ‘Someone lit the blue touchpaper.’

  He sighed. ‘I had a navy, an army and an air force. I forgot the fire brigade.’

  Beside me on the grass, Leotta shivered and I realised the night had turned cool. Hanna slipped off his uniform jacket and draped it onto her shoulders.

  ‘How did you pull it off?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s something I’d like to know too,’ I said.

  Leotta shrugged. ‘Nothing much to it. The hardest part was getting down the ladder with this arm. I had a nasty moment when the tractor came out of the hangar, but then the driver disappeared again and his friend was too busy watching the fun and games on the runway to notice me coming up behind him.’

  Hanna said, ‘What did you hit him with? You made quite a dent in the back of his skull.’

  ‘A wrench that Captain Dehn gave me on the plane. Did I kill him?’

  ‘Oh no. I’d say he’ll be ready to face the music after a bit of a hospital stay.’

  I said, ‘And the tractor?’

  Leotta smiled. ‘One of those opportunities that are too good to turn down. It was just sitting there. I improvised a fuse and used the wrench to jam the gas pedal and – voilà! – a mobile bomb.’

  Hanna blew out a breath. ‘A bit risky, wasn’t it, especially with Kemp inside the hangar?’

  She gave me a nervous glance. ‘That was the one part of the plan I had reservations about. But I didn’t have an awful lot of choice. And anyway, you’d already survived two assassination attempts. I didn’t think you’d have any trouble with a third.’

  I laughed.

  Hanna held out his arm and helped Leotta to her feet, then did the same for me. He pointed to the still-burning hangar. ‘There’s an awful lot of money going up in smoke there.’

  Automatically I said, ‘I wonder who insured it.’

  Then I began to laugh again and Hanna stared at me. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘The Learjet,’ I said, chuckling. ‘A very expensive aircraft. It’s insured by Western and Continental.’

  I was still laughing when the doctor gave me a sedative.

  III

  It was a bright London day but inside Heathrow Airport Trans-Continental Terminal Building the weather makes no difference. Rain or shine, it’s always the same: a flat white glare of fluorescence. I had some time to kill so I bought The Times at the news stand. The information I wanted would certainly be in the old reliable Times and when I turned to the for
eign news page there it was, a couple of paragraphs towards the bottom of the page.

  The Campanillan election results made fascinating reading. The Liberal Party – 19 seats; the Conservative Party – 18 seats; the People’s Party – one seat. The new Prime Minister, Dr Jacob McKittrick, was expected to make a speech later that day outlining the policy of the new government.

  I smiled. I had first met Jake when he was hoeing a field of corn. He had a harder row to hoe now. Joe Hawke would see to that with the break-even vote of the People’s Party. Politics on Campanilla were going to be even more interesting in the next few years.

  The first passengers had started to come though Customs so I wadded up the newspaper and dropped it into a waste bin. When I saw her appear, she looked drawn and thinner. She saw me as I walked up and said, ‘Hello, Bill. It’s good of you to meet me.’

  ‘Hello, Leotta,’ I said. ‘Are these all your bags?’

  ‘That’s right.’ She paused. ‘Is there anywhere we can get a coffee? The stuff they serve on the plane hardly qualifies.’

  As we walked to the coffee shop, she took an envelope from her handbag. ‘Mr Stern asked me to give you this.’

  ‘Thanks. How is he?’

  ‘He’s been looking after everything,’ she said. ‘He saw me on to the plane.’ She shook her head in wonder. ‘Mrs Salton has been very good to me.’

  ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘No. She’s left Campanilla and gone to live in the States.’

  We went into the coffee shop and sat down. I ordered coffee and opened the envelope. There were two pieces of paper, one a short note:

  Dear Bill,

  I once offered you a job if ever you needed it. I hope you will accept this in lieu. It is an inadequate reward for what you did at El Cerco and for trying to protect the reputation of my husband. It is just for you. Miss Tomsson has been taken care of, as has Mrs Ogilvie.

  Please understand that I now want to move on with my life, so I would very much appreciate it if you did not contact me again.

  Sincerely,

  Jill Salton

  The cheque was for £50,000.

  I was going to accept it, all right: I needed the money. I was out of a job. The noble Lord Hosmer, of course, was untouchable. He’d returned to the boardroom of Western and Continental and carried on as if nothing had happened. There’s an expectation of entitlement at that level of society, and with the insulation of his seat in the House of Lords and everything which that implied, he could look forward to a long and wealthy retirement. I don’t generally wish people ill, but in his case I’m prepared to make an exception.

  His niece was a different matter entirely. I did understand: Jill Salton was retiring behind the barricade of her millions. Besides the traumatic experience of a life-threatening gunshot wound to the abdomen, she had seen all the elements of her privileged existence fall apart around her. Her devoted husband revealed to be a philanderer. Their shared vision for the future of their island home left in tatters by a corrupt political elite. Her own flesh and blood conspiring to destroy everything she held dear. I could see why she wanted to retreat to America.

  I put the letter away and said, ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’ve signed up for medical school,’ said Leotta. ‘It’s all been arranged.’

  ‘Is your arm up to it?’

  ‘It’ll have to be. Term begins in three months.’ She looked down into her coffee cup. ‘But the doctor did say I should rest up until then.’

  ‘So, three months. Made any plans?’

  She shook her head.

  I said, ‘The daffodils will just be coming out at the cottage. You’re too late for the snowdrops, I’m afraid.’

  When she looked up her eyes were misty.

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘The car’s pointing in the right direction anyway, down the Great West Road.’ I stood up to go and she followed. She was certainly going to make an exotic addition to a Devon village.

  The four-ale bar would never be the same again.

  AFTERWORD

  The first page of Bagley’s letter accompanying his manuscript.

  DOMINO ISLAND: A HISTORY

  There is immense gratification for a researcher when they retrieve from an archive box an item that has not been seen, or thought lost, for many years. Such was the emotion for me when, on the afternoon of Wednesday 17 May 2017, I removed a package marked ‘Because Salton Died’ from a box which was part of the Desmond Bagley archive, held at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in Boston, USA.

  I, and others, had been aware of the existence of a typescript listed in the collection as a finished but unpublished novel written by Bagley, but no one knew the state of the novel and fate had deigned me the opportunity of actually opening the package. I found inside an original draft large post quarto typescript consisting of 243 pages, typed on a manual typewriter, together with a photocopy of the typescript. The typescript, of approximately 89,000 words, bore on its title page:

  NEW NOVEL

  BECAUSE SALTON DIED

  (if you can think of a better, please do)

  I realised that I was the first person to have opened the package since it was sent to the archive by Joan Bagley in late 1997.

  Instituted in 1963 as Special Collections and renamed in 2003 to honour its founder, the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center is located in the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University. It is a repository, with public access, archiving material for individuals in the fields of literature, criticism, journalism, drama, music, film, civil rights, diplomacy and national affairs. In those early days of the archive Howard Gotlieb kept a weather eye on individuals whom he might approach with a view to asking them to donate their papers to the archive in the future. Howard Gotlieb personally wrote to Desmond Bagley on 23 December 1964 requesting just that, which showed great foresight as Bagley had by then only published his first novel The Golden Keel.

  Following the publication of the author’s second novel High Citadel, in 1965, a Bagley novel was published every year until The Freedom Trap (London: Collins, 1971). Bagley was in the habit of starting novels only to abandon them if he felt they were not progressing as he wished. He often returned to some of these projects, revising and redrafting them and occasionally borrowing sections for other novels as the years progressed. Although a prolific writer he suffered from brief bouts of writer’s block and 1971, as it happened, turned out to be a particularly bad year for the author.

  On 22 July 1969 Bagley visited Iceland to conduct research for his novel Running Blind. It was Bagley’s first espionage novel and the first of his published novels to be researched on location, the consequence of which is a story displaying a detailed authenticity of background. It was to become one of his most popular novels, which was later produced by BBC Scotland as a three-part television series. However following publication in 1970 it was Hollywood that had taken an interest in this novel and the author was approached by film producer Aaron Rosenburg who asked Bagley to visit Los Angeles to write a screenplay for the novel.

  Bagley’s visit to Hollywood during late 1970, early 1971 turned out to be quite an unpleasant experience, he later recalled:

  This was a terrible experience that I would not wish to experience again. Everything you have read about Hollywood is true. I felt it was a great honour when I was informed that a movie would be made from the book and that I should travel to Hollywood to write the script. But my experience of the capital of cinema was a poor experience. I was there three months, and during the whole time we could not agree on a script. I sat there with a good idea in mind whilst around me sat a group of senior men who could not agree.

  Bagley and his wife returned from the USA and very soon afterwards, during January and February of 1971, went on a month-long tour crossing the Sahara desert. In responding to a personal letter before the visit, the author mentioned that he was considering writing a novel about the desert for publication in 1972.

 
; Returning from the Sahara, Bagley attempted a first draft of a book with the working title Sahara Novel but abandoned it quite quickly, and was still faced with the problem of providing Collins with a book for publication in 1971. He decided to revisit The Freedom Trap, originally started in 1966 and abandoned, completing it in May that year for publication in June. 1971 was a troublesome year for the author, for in that year he started four books, all of which collapsed somewhere between chapters four and six. He attributed this period of writer’s block mainly to his Hollywood trip, and during that year Bagley became increasingly frustrated with the movie industry, writing on 16 July:

  One thing that frets me about the film industry is that the movie moguls are hypnotised by instancy – a book must be written now, now, now.

  In fact back in June 1968 Bagley had been asked by Robert Clark of the Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) to write on the specific topic of heroin smuggling with the view to a film being produced. The author duly produced the requested novel, delivering The Spoilers to his publishers in November of that year. Following publication of the novel ABPC was taken over by EMI and the film project was shelved. This joined a growing list of titles that had seen a similar fate: The Golden Keel, High Citadel, Landslide, and more recently Running Blind. Later that year Warner Brothers Productions Ltd, who had by then acquired films rights to The Freedom Trap, made a request to change the name of this novel for the publication of the hardback edition in the United States. Bagley thought that The Freedom Trap was a good title, and didn’t want to change it without a good suggestion.

  Bagley decided that he must break the jinx of 1971 and wrote to his publishers on 2 January 1972 indicating that he would be starting a new novel the next day. The drafts he started, of which there were three, centred around a former ex-long range desert group army colonel, named Fermor in two of the drafts and Col. Andrew Mathieson in the third. Other characters in the drafts bore the names of Major Andy Tozier, and John Follet, characters that had previously appeared in his novel The Spoilers written for ABPC.