Sunstrike_The next gripping Commander Shaw thriller

by Philip McCutchan

  “I don’t take orders from goddam limeys,” he said. He slid sideways on the bench and, just as I was about to yank him to his feet, he cut across me verbally and addressed himself through the cell bars to the Master-at-Arms. “Hey, this Britisher’s trying to put the screw on me. What if I don’t want to talk, guess I don’t have to?”

  The Master-at-Arms moved across slowly. “Admiral’s orders, son,” he said laconically, but advised me to take it easy just the same. “He has his rights, Commander.”

  “So had the dead men,” I said. I caught the Master’s eye, and held it. “You know just what Admiral Rackstall gave permission for. This goes beyond the base you know that too.” I said no more; I watched the effect on the Master-at-Arms, and I saw ‘Pentagon’ move into his expression and be followed up by ‘CIA’ and I saw a degree of uncertainty until he lifted a hand and tilted his cap and scratched his head and when he said, kind of slowly, that he’d go find the Exec and get himself a ruling, I understood. I nodded, and jerked my head meaningly towards the armed seaman on guard by the door into the cell alleyway. The Master-at-Arms turned and went off and when he left the alleyway the guard went with him and I turned back to Mr Ellum.

  “Now,” I said. “You don’t like limeys. You have your chance to show it. As for me, I’ll be showing you what the heavy mob from my outfit can do.”

  Ellum looked at the bandage that was still on my left upper arm and gave a tight grin like a snarl. I didn’t have time to tell him again to get on his feet, he took off from the bench and fired himself at me like a rocket. I swayed to one side at the last moment and he hit the bars. If he hadn’t been quick enough to take them with his hands he would have wedged his head through and hanged himself. I got him round the middle and pulled, but he hung on and kicked out with his feet. The laces having been removed, his shoes flew off. When I slackened off on the pull, he let go, dropped to the ground on all fours, and sprang like a cat. This time I wasn’t quite fast enough on the side-step — my months of easy living were telling to that extent — and he got an arm around my neck and we both crashed and rolled over and over, hands at each other’s throats. When I thought he was on the point of throttling me, he let go of my throat and a thumb was pressed into my right eye, hard, until the eyeball seemed to burst through to the back of the socket in blinding pain and many coloured lights that flashed and whorled and burned. I shifted my grip and grabbed both his wrists and forced them back and away, then twisted one arm up behind his back and wrenched until I felt and heard something crack.

  There was an appalling scream and a knee took me hard where it hurt most and could do much damage. I doubled in agony and while I lay there he used his good elbow in my kidneys, lying half over me to achieve this. As the pain in my nerve centre began to ebb I twisted till I was on my back and used my bent knees as a lever, using all the strength I could find. Ellum rose in the air and shot backwards to fetch up with his back cracking on the edge of the wooden bench. He screamed and slid to the floor and I scented a win and I gave him no chance at all to recover lost ground. I was on him in a flash, conscious of a burning pain in my shot-up arm and a good deal of blood coming from the wound. But I picked Ellum up and I slugged him good and hard on the point of the chin, and when he went down I picked him up again and gave him a repeat. Again and again … when I’d used up my reserves of strength he was a limp mess of blood, pulp and loose teeth. My breath was coming hard and fast. When it had eased down a little I said, “Right, now talk or I’ll start again. My aim is, to be a bloody sight worse than WUSWIPP.”

  “Look,” he said desperately, and I hit him again, hard. “Jeez,” he said, and started sobbing like a woman. That was his lot, I saw that plain. I yelled out for the MAA and he came back into the alleyway, minus the Exec. He too said “Jeez” but on a different note, one of awe and concern. I told him I would take full responsibility and of course he hadn’t seen a thing except the result. And I asked him to get hold of Commander Warfield and a stretcher.

  *

  After all that, it would have been too bad if Ellum had turned out to be the wrong man, but he wasn’t. I’d had him dead to rights. I interviewed him in a windowless room deep inside the security section’s office block, and I had all the trimmings of the red-hot grill. The Americans do this sort of thing well, and Warfield had once had a secondment to the CIA where he’d been extremely nicely trained. Ellum was sat in the orthodox position, in the full beam of a very bright light behind which was me. Otherwise the room was in darkness and there was an armed guard with his back against the door while Warfield sat in a corner taking a full recording on tape. Ellum confessed the lot: after his mate Roosenbacher had been put in arrest, he had sent out a radio message to warn Professor Nodd that he had been compromised, and as a result of this Nodd had sent in the gunmen.

  “By what means?” I asked.

  He said, “A submarine, lying off beyond the reefs.”

  “And inflatable dinghies through the entry channel to the logistics pier?”

  “Right.”

  “And the nationality of this submarine?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Maybe it’ll come to you,” I said, “and it better had. Meanwhile, where did you send your radio message, your warning?”

  He gave me the station’s call sign and said he didn’t know where it was situated geographically. He could have been speaking the truth — WUSWIPP never has parted with more information than its people need to know to do their jobs effectively — but I didn’t think he was. When you’ve had some experience of interrogation, you are your own DIY lie detector. I suggested, “How about the Candars?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I don’t, not necessarily. The Candars have been burning up. Nodd doesn’t have suicidal tendencies, so far as I know. On the other hand, he may have kept his strong-arm squad handy there, and they certainly got here too fast to have come from much further off. Right?”

  He blinked in the light’s beam and said reluctantly, “Okay. They came from the Candars. I don’t know where they went after here.”

  “I’ll be finding out,” I said, “don’t worry! But I now deduce that there’s a radio station in the Candars. The speed of the operation suggests that even if your signal went elsewhere initially, it must have been relayed to the Candars by radio.” I paused. “For now, one thing more: where’s Professor Nodd?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Think again, Ellum.”

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t get told everything, you know that?”

  “You’re a bloody liar,” I said. “I’ve read your file, remember? In civilian life you gained high qualifications in communications and electrical engineering. You became an enlisted man rather than take a commission … I believe you to be a high-level plant, ordered by WUSWIPP to enlist so you wouldn’t get quite the same level of security checking as an officer. A plant, all ready to take over the communications set-up here —”

  “On a burned out base?”

  Behind the light, I smiled happily. “Thanks, Ellum. That was a slip, wasn’t it? Not quite yourself — are you? So you know the facts, just as I know them. I have one over-riding problem: how to stop it happening. That means finding this Nodd.” I leaned forward. “Where’s Nodd, Ellum? Do I have to take you apart to find out?”

  I saw him lick his lips and dart glances sideways. I said, “It’s no use, there’s no escape. You’ve had it, Ellum. Back you’ll go to the States for a grand indictment for treason. If you don’t fry, WUSWIPP will get you one day. Then there’s that family of yours down in Texas. You’ve one hope left: help us to smash WUSWIPP.”

  The bright light showed the pulp, the mash of lips and teeth, the blood that was still dripping on to his once white singlet, and the flop and dangle of the broken arm that had not yet, for breaking-down reasons, been splinted. The head rocked as though he was on the verge of madness and I saw tears. I didn’t need to torment the bastard any
more at all. He said, or rather mumbled as though hoping WUSWIPP wouldn’t hear, “Nodd’s in China. Mainland China.”

  *

  I was not totally surprised, and it wasn’t just the Chinese set-up in Woolwich: leaving aside Russia as per Max it reasonably had to be China. But it did raise problems, very big ones: China would scarcely be easy to penetrate and would be even harder to get out of afterwards. Meanwhile I had further advices from Ellum to ponder, for once he’d talked he gave me all he knew to help save his own dirty skin: Nodd was tucked away in South China, in the province of Kwangsi. His laboratory was out in the wilds between Yamchow and Shangsze, north of the Gulf of Tongking. Ellum made another confession: he’d sent out a report of my arrival with Miss Mandrake, which was why she had been hijacked. Fairly obviously they’d meant to get me too, and there had been a slipup very likely they’d been put off course by the result of Ellum’s attack. Ellum thought the original submarine could have been diverted back to Diego Garcia to pick us up, but he didn’t know for sure. Nor did he know where the submarine was heading, but for my money it would be the Gulf of Tongking.

  “Which,” I said to Warfield after I broke up the session, “is where I’ll head — with your Mr Ellum, if you don’t mind. I’d like him handy in case he’s been lying; nasty accidents can always happen to liars, which he’ll know. Have you, or has the Admiral, the availability of a US submarine?”

  “You’ll have to ask Rackstall, Commander.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said, “but first a trip a little nearer home. I’m heading out for the Candars — just in case.” I had to satisfy myself that Miss Mandrake wasn’t there; for all I knew, Nodd might deal with her at long range, by a dose of UV through his bloody ozone layer, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that. I turned away to go and make my report to Rackstall and just before I left the room a communications officer came up with a cypher he’d just broken down. It was from the Pentagon and it relayed news received from the Defence Ministry in London: unusually high noon temperatures had been reported the day before in North Yorkshire, on the fringe of the Dales around Ripon. Grass had withered and the sheep were frantic in their woolly coats. People had suffered badly from sunburn and in the village of Kirkby Malzeard a house had caught fire. On the road from Ripon to Leyburn motorists were stranded with burst tyres. It seemed that Nodd was spreading his wings and there was an urgent need of speed.

  7

  When I headed out across the blue Indian Ocean for the Candars, I didn’t take Ellum: I left him in the cooler, keeping him on ice for the run to the Gulf of Tongking. Rackstall had said he had no submarines currently available but he would get things in motion and would maybe have some news when I returned from the Candars. As for me, I didn’t know when I would get back but it would be soonest possible. I left the logistics pier in a glass-fibre mine hunter, the USS Cato E. Parnell with a trusty ship’s company under orders from the Rear-Admiral in person to give me every assistance short of committing the United States to an international war. The Captain of the Cato E. Parnell was a lieutenant-commander named Beery, and he was somewhat uptight about his mission. The Candars, he said gloomily as we left the atoll for the deep sea, were kind of independent.

  I said I knew that, but queried the ‘kind of’.

  Beery spread his hands. “What’s independence these days? Who’s truly independent? The Candars are only that way because they’re so darned barren no one else wants them.”

  “So,” I said comfortingly, “we should be okay, shouldn’t we? We can land without query — just like your people did when they brought the Candarians off before they all burned up.”

  “That was a mercy mission. And I wouldn’t be too sure about landing without query, Commander.” Beery bent a long back to his azimuth circle and checked a bearing. “I go back to what I said, what’s independence? My answer’s this: it’s a goddam invite to get taken over the moment you get to look, well, interesting.”

  I nodded. “It’s a theory.” It was, too: I could imagine plenty of nations wanting to take a look at the Candars once the word got around of curious happenings in the islands. No more than a look, though. I reckoned Beery was dead to rights in thinking no one would actually want to plant their national flag on Candarian soil. The islands were not of much use; too small, too scattered, much too liable to be swept, literally, by hurricanes. Those hurricanes fairly regularly decimated the local population, all of whom had dwelt on one island, the largest, Kakai, where they’d eked out a precarious and pointless existence and avoided the raging waters as best they could when the bad weather of the south-west monsoon came down upon them like the wrath of God.

  It was Kakai we were bound for now. At the Cato E. Parnell’s best speed of around twenty-five knots, Beery reckoned we should arrive off the island at dawn next day. I spent the daylight hours of that voyage taking it easy in a deck chair beneath a canvas awning rigged aft of the navigating bridge, drinking Coca Cola and worrying about Miss Mandrake. The hours dragged: I’d asked for a helicopter, but Rackstall had refused on the advice of his meteorological experts. One of those bloody hurricanes was in fact on the weather chart and a helicopter wouldn’t have lived two minutes. He wouldn’t have risked even the Cato E. Parnell if I hadn’t plugged that report from Whitehall. By ozone layer penetration, I said, the United States were a mere stone’s-throw from the Yorkshire Dales, and when the Georgia peanut fields began to cook and the tyres started popping on the freeways then Rear-Admiral Rackstall would be first in the line of fire from the White House. He said, confidently, that he could take that but just the same he ordered out the Cato E. Parnell …

  The met men were dead right: just a few hours premature on their prognostications, that was all. What they had predicted for around lunch time came into view as the watch changed at 2000 hours, A line of black started to form on the southern horizon, an ominous line that extended around us to east and west as it grew. You could almost hear the barometer drop; it had been tending downwards for some while, this being the first indication, but now it went through the bottom. The day darkened very suddenly, and a wind came, light at first but steadily increasing. Seasonwise, we happened to be right on the divide between the south-west and north-east monsoon periods, and this hurricane was the first of the south-west period. From now on, the sunshine days would be over, giving place to grey skies and restless seas and a horrid damp fug. Currently we had more, much more than that to live through. And this hurricane, having at first been late, was cramming on speed. Usually they don’t advance at more than around fifteen to twenty miles an hour; this one was overtaking us as we hurried north-easterly. Beery, of course, was ready for it and everything was battened-down for filthy weather, the anchors nipped in hard by their slips and extra lashings rove, and the hawsepipes plugged. The seaboat was well griped-in to the davits and below decks everything that could move had been secured so that it had a hope of staying put. Nevertheless, when the violence caught right up with us and left us just outside the storm centre, and Beery altered course to put the ship’s head into wind and sea, we were almost disembowelled: later, Beery nicknamed it Hurricane Hysterectomy. The wind’s shriek was punctuated throughout the long night by the crash of crockery, the race of the engines as periodically the screws lifted from the water to thrash thunderously and shakingly in the empty air, and the groans of vomiting seamen. Solid sea banged its way into the bridge and wheelhouse, smashing screens as it did so. A searchlight was ripped from its moorings in the starboard wing; the seaboat was smashed into total wreckage and its bits Hew off along the wind to mark our passage. Even a hawse-pipe managed to get buckled, and in so doing bent the shank of the port anchor.

  “We’re a goddam mess,” Beery said explosively when, soon after dawn, we came into quieter waters. “Jeez, just look at it!”

  “Yes,” I said. “How far off the Candars are we?”

  “Farther than we should be, Commander, at a guess.” A guess it had to be, if a more or less informed one. B
eery could estimate his drift reasonably accurately, but overhead there was nothing, and had for some hours been nothing, to use the sextant on. Also, our transmitting aerials had been torn away and we were unable to request a radio bearing. However, Beery’s guess reckoned we would reach Kakai shortly after noon and with that I had to be content and in the meantime pray that Miss Mandrake had not been swept off the Candars, if indeed that was where she was. Time would tell; and when at last we raised the island of Kakai I was appalled to see the result of that hurricane. So far as could be seen the place was bare. Where they had not already been burned by Nodd the palm trees that once had provided the few inhabitants with their meagre living were either flat or uprooted altogether and there was not a hut or shelter left standing. I felt my heart sink fast as the Cato E. Parnell limped through the gap in the coral and entered the lagoon, which was as grey and disturbed as the outer seas.

  “Poor sods,” I said, in amazed reference to the former inhabitants. “How often does it get this bad for them?”

  Beery said off-handedly, “Every time there’s a goddam hurricane. Then they build up again till the next time.”

  Miss Mandrake’s prospects looked worse by the minute and I was realising how much I was going to miss her. Beery let go his starboard anchor, which fortunately functioned all right, and when his ship had got her cable he fell out the hands from stations to tidy up and make repairs and told his chief boatswain’s mate to muster the landing party — I had been allocated six seamen to accompany me on a search of Kakai and frankly I reckoned that was not going to take more than a half-hour or so. In the absence of the seaboat, we were ferried ashore in an inflatable rubber dinghy, me with a revolver and the seamen with Armalite rifles. When we set foot on Kakai, it squelched, spouting rainwater and seawater mixed. I had noted our time of arrival as a minute or two after noon, and now I began to notice heat, rather more than I would have expected. I looked up, as if expecting to see Professor Nodd staring down from his hole in the ozone layer, and saw only the heavy overcast, for which I was truly thankful since it was clearly having its effect on Nodd’s schemes. Like the rest of us, he was largely at the mercy of the weather.