Алистер Маклин - Puppet on a Chain

I elected to walk because I didn’t have the car any more and because I had become allergic to taxis of Amsterdam. The streets were empty, at least the streets I chose were. It seemed a very quiet and peaceful city.

I reached the docks area, located myself, and moved on till I stood in the dark shadow of a storage shed. The luminous dial of my watch told me that it was twenty minutes to two. The wind had increased in strength and the air had turned much colder, but there was no rain about although there was rain in the air. I could smell it over the strong nostalgic odours of sea and tar and ropes and all the other things that make dockside areas smell the same the world over. Tattered dark clouds scudded across the only fractionally less dark sky, occasionally revealing a glimpse of a pale high half-moon, more often obscuring it, but even when the moon was hidden the darkness was never absolute, for above there were always rapidly changing patches of starlit sky.

In the brighter intervals I looked out across the harbour that stretched away into first dimness and then nothingness. There were literally hundreds of barges to be seen in this, one of the great barge harbours of the world, ranging in size from tiny twenty-footers to the massive Rhine barges, all jammed in a seemingly inextricable confusion. The confusion, I knew, was more apparent than real. Close packed the barges undoubtedly were but, although it would call for the most intricate manoeuvring, each barge had, in fact, access to a narrow sea lane, which might intersect with two or three progressively larger lanes before reaching the open water beyond. The barges were connected to land by a series of long wide floating gangways, which in turn had other and narrower gangways attached at right angles to them.

The moon went behind a cloud. I moved out of the shadows on to one of the main central gangways, my rubber shoes quite soundless on the wet wood, and even had I been clumping along in hob-nailed boots I question whether anyone – other than those who were ill-intentioned to me – would have paid any heed, because although all the barges were almost certainly inhabited by their crews and in many cases their crews and families, there were only one or two scattered cabin lights to be seen among all the hundreds of craft lying there: and apart from the faint threnody of the wind and the soft creaking and rubbing as the wind made the barges work gently at their moorings, the silence was total. The barge harbour was a city in itself and the city was asleep.

I’d traversed about a third of the length of the main gangway when the moon broke through. I stopped and looked round.

About fifty yards behind me two men were walking purposefully and silently towards me. They were but shadows, silhouettes, but I could see that the silhouettes of their right arms were longer than those of their left arms. They were carrying something in their right hands. I wasn’t surprised to see those objects in their hands just as I hadn’t been surprised to see the men themselves.

I glanced briefly to my right. Two more men were advancing steadily from land on the adjacent paralleling gangway to the right. They were abreast with the two on my own gangway.

I glanced to the left. Two more of them, two more moving dark silhouettes. I admired their co-ordination.

I turned and kept on walking towards the harbour. As I went, I extracted the gun from its holster, removed the waterproof covering, zipped up the covering again and replaced it in a zipped pocket. The moon went behind a cloud. I began to run, and as I did so I glanced over my shoulder. The three pairs of men had also broken into a run. I made another five yards and glanced over my shoulder again. The two men on my gangway had stopped and were lining up their guns on me, or seemed to be, because it was difficult to see in the starlight, but a moment later I was convinced they had for narrow red flames licked out in the darkness although there was no sound of shots, which was perfectly understandable for no man in his right senses was going to upset hundreds of tough Dutch, German and Belgian bargees if he could possibly help it. They appeared, however, to have no objection to upsetting me. The moon came out again and I started to run a second time.

The bullet that hit me did more damage to my clothes than it did to me although the swift burning pain on the outside of my upper right arm made me reach up involuntarily to clasp it. Enough was enough. I swerved off the main gangway, jumped on to the bows of a barge that was moored by a small gangway at right angles and ran silently along the deck till I got in the shelter of the wheelhouse aft. Once in shelter, I edged a cautious eye round the corner.

The two men on the central gangway had stopped and were making urgent sweeping motions to their friends on the right, indicating that I should be outflanked and, more likely than not, shot in the back. They had, I thought, very limited ideas about what constituted fair play and sportsmanship: but there was no questioning their efficiency. Quite plainly, if they were going to get me at all – and I rated their chances as good – it was going to be by this encircling or outflanking method and it would obviously be a very good thing for me if I could disabuse them of this idea as soon as I could; so I temporarily ignored the two men on the central gangway, assuming, and correctly, I hoped, that they would remain where they were and wait for the outflankers to catch me unawares, and turned round to face the left gangway.

Five seconds and they were in view, not running, but walking deliberately and peering into the moon-shadows cast by the wheelhouses and cabins of the barges, which was a very foolhardy or just simply foolish thing to do because I was in the deepest shadow I could find while they, by contrast, were almost brutally exposed by the light of the half-moon and I saw them long before they ever saw me. I doubt whether they ever saw me. One of them, for a certainty, did not, for he never saw anything again: he must have been dead before he struck the gangway and slid with a curious absence of noise, no more than a sibilant splash, into the harbour. I lined up for a second shot, but the other man had reacted very quickly indeed and flung himself backwards out of my line of sight before I could squeeze the trigger again. It occurred to me, for no reason at all, that my sportsmanship was on an even lower level than theirs, but I was in the mood for sitting ducks that night.

I turned and moved for’ard again and peered round the edge of the wheelhouse. The two men on the central gangway hadn’t moved. Perhaps they didn’t know what had happened. They were a very long way away for an accurate pistol shot by night, but I took a long steady careful aim and tried anyway. But this duck was too far away. I heard a man give an exclamation and clutch his leg, but from the alacrity with which he followed his companion and jumped from the gangway into the shelter of a barge he couldn’t have been badly hurt. The moon went behind a cloud again, a very small cloud, but the only cloud for the next minute or so and they had me pin-pointed. I scrambled along the barge, regained the main gangway and started to run further out into the harbour.

I hadn’t got ten yards when that damned moon made its presence felt again. I flung myself flat, landing so that I faced inshore. To my left the gangway was empty which was hardly surprising as the confidence of the remaining man there must have been badly shaken. I glanced to my right. The two men there were much closer than the two who had just so prudently vacated the central gangway and from the fact that they were still walking forward in a purposeful and confident manner it was apparent that they did not yet know that one of their number was at the bottom of the harbour, but they were as quick to learn the virtue of prudence as the other three had been, for they disappeared from the gangway very quickly when I loosed off two quick and speculative shots at them, both of which clearly missed. The two men who had been on the central gangway were making a cautious attempt to regain it, but they were too far away to worry me or I them.