by Peter Tonkin
“Who else?” asked Stone.
“Slobowski and the Englishman. Over there.”
“Englishman?”
“Andrews. From Lloyd’s. So he says.” Still with Rebecca over his shoulder, Stone waded over to the far side of the lake. Slobowski lay behind a large rock. He had been shot high on the right side of his chest. Nasty but not too serious.
The Englishman lay a little farther on. Another chest wound. This one was serious. Stone went unsteadily down on one knee. “How does it feel, Soldier?”
“Pretty bad, Alec.” He coughed red foam. “Christ! Hurts!”
Stone nodded. “Hang on.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Nash watched Stone put down the inert body of the girl. Reality came and went. He would hardly have recognized Stone. The massive quiet competence which now invested the man. The change was amazing. It held all of Soldier Nash’s attention while his quiet executive took off his ragged white shirt and wadded it up as a rudimentary pressure-bandage. “Thanks, old son.”
“You’ll be all right. You know what they say…”
“Yes. Old soldiers never die…”
“Gant.”
“Yes?”
“Slobowski and Nash are pretty bad. Is there any First Aid stuff?”
“The aircraft dropped some. I’ll go.” He propped Mrs Gash against a boulder, and, wondering who Nash was - who Stone was, for that matter - he waded into the lake. He ducked under the blackrock lintel, took a few steps through the tunnel, erupted out of the cave and took the slope down to the camp at a dead run. Here he began to heave the boxes around looking for the First Aid kit.
Suddenly there were lights. Blinding, transfixing. Like stage lights. He rocked back on his heels, shading his eyes with his hands. He could see only brightness. All right buster, gettem up.”
“Get what up where?” He wasn’t being funny. He wasn’t being smart. He wasn’t even being brave: he was simply too stunned to react.
“All right Hannegan,” said someone else. The second man moved into the brightness. He was dressed in black. His face was blacked. Gant was jerked back to his early Special Forces days.
“Ed Lydecker,” said the man in black. Gant got up. He was a little taller than Lydecker. “Eldridge Gant,” he said. There was a pause, then Lydecker shoved out his hand. “I wouldn’t have recognized you, sir.
Gant shook the hand. “Look,” he said. “I don’t know who you people are, but we have some wounded men up in the cave back there.”
“I see. Hannegan, take some men and medication. And go in quietly.”
“Very quietly,” said Gant, and told them how to get in. After they left, he collapsed quietly onto the sand. Lydecker looked down at him. God, he looked old: old and beat. “What’s been going on here, sir?”
Silence.
“Mr Gant, sir?” Gant’s head rolled back on his thin neck. His eyes were still half closed. “Where’re you from, Mr Lydecker?”
“Off the ship out there.” He gestured towards Lincoln.
“How did you find us?”
“Radio message from a ’plane, sir.”
“Why all this?”
“Precautions, sir. We heard shooting.” He shrugged. Gant shook his head slowly. Well, thought Lydecker, if I’d been marooned for a week and more maybe I’d be a mite strange myself. “How many are there of you altogether, sir?” he asked gently. Gant flinched as though he had been struck. “Six I think,” he said.
“Six off the Wanderer?” Lydecker was stunned. “What about the other survivors?”
“Five off Wanderer. One Englishman who parachuted in with the supplies. There are no more.” Lydecker simply didn’t believe it.
There was a scrape of footsteps, voices. Lydecker’s gun came up. “All right, Ed. Only us.” It was Hannegan back. They had a man with a grey mustache on an improvised stretcher, and were supporting a second whose chest and shoulder were bound. There was a broad, powerful looking man who had no shirt helping a girl dressed in Hannegan’s black blouse supporting an older woman.
“Is that alH” he asked Hannegan.
“No,” said the man without the shirt in an English accent, “There’s one more. We’ll have to go back for him in a while.” There was some deep meaning hidden in these words. Gant stirred: “You want to go back in now, Alec?”
“Sorry, sir,” said Lydecker. “I’m not letting any of you out of my sight until we’ve got some of this cleared up. We’ll take you back to the ship now, if you don’t mind.” Gant began to disagree but the Englishman stopped him: “It’s all right. He’s not going anywhere. We’ll be back.”
“I could send in a couple of men to look for him,” offered Lydecker. “Is he hurt too?”
“God, I hope so,” said the Englishman, then he stopped and seemed to collect himself. “No. You wouldn’t find him and your men would stand no chance at all. I’ll come back.”
“And I’ll come back,” said Gant. There was something in their voices which made Lydecker shiver.
They went down to the beach and wearily climbed into the dinghies. They left the lights in place, but switched them off. They needed the space for the stretcher and the wounded. For those who could climb, there was a ladder down Lincoln’s side. For those who could not, a stretcher came down from the gantries.
As he climbed onto the deck, Lydecker checked his watch: it was after one. He went down with the survivors to the sickbay. They were wrapped in blankets and given coffee to drink. They were pale, hollow-eyed, thin. The men had fairly heavy beards. They all stank. They had the look of an outing from a lunatic asylum. Lydecker was put in mind of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. On the island, in the wind, they looked dangerous. Here under electric lights, surrounded by normality, they looked helpless, mindless: dead beat.
Stone and Gant were restless. As soon as the Ship’s doctor had examined them they began to prowl around the sickbay like animals in a cage. Eventually Gant turned to Lydecker. “We want to go back now,” he said.
“Back?”
“To the island. We have unfinished business.”
Stone said, “There’s a man back there who killed six innocent people. I want him.”
“What?” Lydecker could hardly believe the enormity of the crime. “Are you sure?” How could he tell Abe Parmilee? He took them through to his own cabin. “Right,” he said. “You said six.”
Gant told them off on his fingers: “Slattery, Spooner, Wells, Bates, Laughton, Miss Buhl.”
“Close,” said Stone, “but not quite correct: Spooner, O’Keefe, Slattery, Laughton, Miss Buhl, Bates. It was Wells all along.”
“Wells? WELLS! But I saw him burn.”
There was a silence. Gant sat down. “Explain to me,” he said.
“Spooner was first,” said Stone. “He was at the tiller when it broke during the storm. You remember?” Gant nodded. “Good. The tiller broke. He asked for an oar. We passed one down. You and Rebecca had one end. Then Slobowski, Laughton and myself. Then O’Keefe, Wells, Bates, Mrs Gash, Miss Buhl and Slattery. Wells, you notice, was in the middle, between O’Keefe and Bates. Now what occurred to me was this. If you want to control a lever, then you go to the fulcrum, as though you are balancing a seesaw.
“In that situation, you, Gant, for instance, would have had to have exerted enormous force in order to jerk the far end of the oar over into Spooner. At the other end it might have been easier, but not much more so. In the middle, however, it is a very much easier task. Consider: he would have had a firm anchor in those of us behind him in the bows. Between him and Spooner, there was Bates, then the two women, then Slattery who had very little purchase on the paddle-end of the oar. He would have had the earliest job of all, you see.” They digested this in silence. Then Ly decker said, “But it could have been O’Keefe or Bates.”
“Yes,” said Stone.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” asked Gant.
“I didn’t work it out until we made the island.”
&nb
sp; “And is this all you have to base your accusation on?”
“No. There’s more.”
“Evidence,” demanded Gant.
“No evidence. I can’t even tell you for certain. I’ve fought with him hand to hand and I still couldn’t swear to his identity. But I think I’ve worked out the murders in the boat.”
“O’Keefe?” asked Gant.
“That’s a bit more complex. It was our watch. First he suggested the lamp. That was important. I agreed. We lit it. Then he asked for a cigarette although he didn’t smoke. He dropped the case. Foolishly I bent to pick it up. He swung the tiller, the boom came across, hit me, knocked me out. That’s fact. Now for some surmise. While I was out he salted the water. O’Keefe was only pretending to be asleep. He saw Wells and gave himself away somehow. Wells killed him, sat him up straight, put the Very pistol in his lap. Then he floated the lamp in the water, waited until it had drifted some way away, then woke me up. I noticed the lamp was gone - he said it had fallen overboard. He woke Slattery and oversaw my medicinal whisky.
“By good luck Slattery saw the light. It looked pretty good heaving around out there. It was a small light close by, but we lacked anything to judge its size by and it could have been a ship’s light far away. So we all went wild, except O’Keefe. Wells took the pistol from him and talked to him. We all watched the flares. Then someone staggered, the boat rocked, the boom swung and knocked O’Keefe overboard. We were still watching the flares, looking for the light.”
“And you think O’Keefe was dead then?” asked Gant. “But I saw him move.”
“He was face-down in the water. He was quite still. Then the sharks came in. He didn’t move until the sharks hit him. And he didn’t cry out.”
“The boom could have knocked him out.”
“Yes. But he was face-down in the water. If he had been breathing he would have choked. And he stayed quiet when the sharks hit. I don’t know. Maybe he was so far out he genuinely didn’t notice, but I really and truly think that a live man being torn to pieces by sharks is going to mention it to someone.”
“Yes,” said Lydecker. “I’m inclined to agree. Anyone else?”
“No. On the island it got too open. He stopped leaving traces.”
“But he died,” said Gant. “I saw him BURN”
“Yes. There might be something there, too.”
“What is there in a walking bonfire?”
“Look at it like this. Apart from Spooner, taken by chance, all the other murders were secret, almost personal. But this was public, spectacular. Why? Because he wanted to convince us. Think how much easier it would be for him with us thinking he was dead. He had certainly found the cave by then and now all he wanted was to move into it. He could have just disappeared, of course, but then we might have suspected too soon.”
“Wait,” said Gant. “If it took us so long to find the cave, how come he did it so quickly?”
“What were you looking for on the island?”
“I don’t know…something to eat…a way to get off…a way to stay alive.”
“And all he was looking for was a place to hide. While you were looking at the sea, the cliffs, the outside, he was looking at holes, caves, tunnels...”
“Yeah. I see. But I still don’t see how he burned.” “There was a way. Remember we found Wells drinking out of a hip flask after the water had been salted on the lifeboat?”
“Yes, whisky.”
“Ever see that flask again?”
“No.”
“What are you getting at, Mr Stone?” asked Lydecker. Stone thought for a moment, then he said, “Do you have any whisky?” Lydecker opened a drawer by his bunk and took out a bottle of Bourbon. Stone poured some onto his hands. “Got a match?” Lydecker obliged.
Stone lit his hands. Sheets of flame wrapped around each finger. Clouds of fire, yellow and red. Bright even in the bright room. He held them up like torches. “It’s an old stuntman’s trick,” he said. “If they’ve got to burn in a movie, they rub themselves with alcohol. It burns a quarter of an inch clear of the skin thus doing no damage, unless you keep it up for too long.”
He waved his hands in the air until they went out.
Silence.
It was 0244 when the three of them landed. They beached the rubber craft silently. Gant glanced out to sea. “Hey, the ship’s moving,” he hissed. They all looked. The perspex windows of the Bell six-seater helicopter on the foredeck caught the starlight, turning. “Where’s it going?” whispered Stone. Lydecker shrugged. They began to jog silently up the beach.
“AAAAAAaaaaaaggghh…h…h…!” A terrible scream.
“What was that!” Lydecker.
“Sssh!” Stone.
“By the waterfall,” from Gant: the ghost of a whisper. Stone nodded. They crept forward again, swiftly and silently. Lydecker froze, arm pointing: two figures in the trees. They ran forward fast, silently, guns ready. They fanned out. The two figures stayed where they were. They closed in, crept up, working as a team as though with years of practice.
Easing in, until: “All right,” said Lydecker. “Turn around slowly. No tricks.”
Two strangers turned round. A medium-sized man, lean and hard, and a great shaggy bear who said in scarcely intelligible English. “We are officers from a Soviet submarine. We hear signal on radio and come lend aid…”
Then Lydecker’s lights went on. “Do not move, please.” From behind the glare.
“Wells. You..!” Gant swung round. A bullet kicked up the sand by his foot. “DON’T move, Mr Gant,” said Silas Wells, the Hummingbird. Gant froze. “Very good. Now, throw your guns away, please.” They did so. “Now, sit down. Not you, Gant.” Gant remained on his feet while the others sat carefully on the ground. “I hope for all your sakes you still have your body-belt on, Gant.”
Gant said nothing. “Well?” snapped Wells, his voice cracking up with the strain on the word.
“Yes,” said Gant.
“Take it off.”
Gant pulled up his pullover and took the belt off. “Throw it here.” He threw it. It flew heavy and flat into the dark, weighted by his treasured first edition of Long Day’s Journey into Night.
“I’m going to kill you, Wells,” said Gant.
“I think not. I think it will be the other way around.”
Stone’s back found a lamp-standard.
“Where would you like me to shoot you first, Gant?”
Stone pushed.
“In the leg, perhaps?”
Stone pushed harder.
“In the groin?”
God, it was heavy.
“In the belly, I think, to make up for my disappointment with Miss Dark…”
The lamp crashed over, pulling all the others with it. Dark. Wells began shooting, but nobody was where he had been in the light.
Beria found a gun, rolled on his back and began shooting at the point where the man called Wells had spoken from. But the Hummingbird had also moved: he and the Bee were running for the cliffs and the Bee’s dinghy: two vague shapes in the moonlight.
The five began to run after them. Up the slope they sprinted, slipping, scrabbling, puffing fit to burst. Gant in the lead: he had no gun but he didn’t care. Beria next, .38 Colt at the ready. The others close behind. Stone had a big Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum. Lydecker had another Colt and a torch. He was wondering where his .44 Magnum had gone. And so they raced up the whale’s back hump of the island towards the cliffs. Hummingbird followed the Bee over to their right, towards the north-east cliffs. Each man’s mind was deeply withdrawn, concentrating utterly upon running up the steep, treacherous slope.
The air began to shake.
They ran on, oblivious, each concentrating utterly upon his own special goal.
The air trembled, as though it were the ground quaking. Concussions of pressure thundered without sound upon their eardrums.
The pursuers began to slow. Hummingbird and Bee, highest still, a hundred yards ahead, froze. They were
looking over the tall cliff edges, looking out to sea. Beria fired: the tall one sagged. They were almost up with them now…
But the air was like a deep bass organ note, full of hardly audible sound rushing majestically. Beria dropped on one knee. They were outlined against the distant sea. He could finish them now. He never fired.
Beyond the two men, beyond the cliffs, the ocean in the moonlight gathered itself up. The surface, slick and black, shining faintly, utterly unmarked by foam phosphorescence, whorl or bubble, rose gracefully and incredibly swiftly into the air. Beria caught a glimpse of a ship like a toy labouring up the face of the wave towards the oil-dark round of its crest. He had never seen anything like it. As far as the eye could see on either hand it rose up out of the obsidian ocean, and up and up and up.
“DOWN!” he screamed at last, but the word was indistinguishable from the sound. Maelstrom. The ground shook. Shuddered. Heaved, seeming to throw itself into the conflict as the wave struck.
It was perhaps 100 ft high when it crested a hundred yards out from the cliffs. It was moving at 500 mph. It washed over the lower parts of the island carrying away the two dinghies, the lights, the supplies, the camp, the bushes, the trees, the waterfall, the little cliff, without even a pause. It broke against the cliffs to the north. All of the men screamed as the sound exploded in their ears. The ground shuddered and heaved beneath their clawing fingers. A wall of spray exploded into the air, for a fraction of a second extending the cliff, as in a mirror, for three times its own height. The steady wind pushed much of the spray back out to sea, but still tons of water rained down upon them like boulders, sweeping them towards the cliff edge, smashing them, half drowning them, half killing them. Then it was gone.
The epicentre of the Indian earthquake had been some 20 miles offshore and the frenzied heaving of the ocean had caused three great waves to rise as though a giant had dropped monstrous boulders into the sea. They spread in great concentric circles down the coast of India, across to the coast of Africa, and, moving at nearly 500 mph, across the Indian ocean.
