Алистер Маклин - The Golden Rendezvous

“Susan!” My voice was hoarse, a voice belonging to someone else altogether. “Susan, are you hurt?”

She clung even closer. By some miracle she still held the lantern clutched in her right hand. It was round the back of my neck somewhere but the reflected beam from the ship’s side gave enough light to see by. … Her mask had been torn off, her face was scratched and bleeding, her hair a bedraggled mess, her clothes soaked and her heart going like a captive bird’s. For an incongruous moment an unbidden recollection touched my mind, a recollection of a very cool, very poised, sweetly-malicious, pseudo-solicitous young lady asking me about cocktails only two days ago in Carracio, but the vision faded as soon as it had come, the incongruity was too much.

“Susan!” I said urgently. “Are you–”

“I’m not hurt.” She gave a long tremendous sigh that was more shudder than sigh. “I was just too scared to move.” She eased her grip a trifle, looked at me with green eyes enormous in the pallor of her face, then buried her face in my shoulder. I thought she was going to choke me.

It didn’t last long, fortunately. I felt the grip slowly easing, saw the beam of the lantern shifting, and she was saying in an abnormally matter-of-fact voice: “There they are.”

I turned round and there, not ten feet away, they were indeed. Three coffins – Carreras had already removed the cases – and securely stowed between baffle and bulkhead and padded with tarpaulins, so that they could come to no harm. As Tony Carreras kept on repeating, his old man didn’t miss much. Dark shiny coffins with black-braided ropes and brass handles: one of them had an inlet plaque on the lid, copper or brass, I couldn’t be sure.

“That saves me some trouble.” My voice was almost back to normal. I took the hammer and chisel I’d borrowed from the bo’sun’s store and let them drop. “This screwdriver will be all I need. We’ll find two of those with what’s normally inside them. Give me the lantern and stay there. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“You’ll be quicker if I hold the lantern,” Her voice matched my own in steadiness but the pulse in her throat was going like a trip-hammer. “Hurry, please.”

I was in no way to argue. I caught the foot of the nearest coffin and pulled it towards me so that I could have room to work. It was jammed. I slid my hand under the end to lift it and suddenly my finger found a hole in the bottom of the coffin. And then another. And a third. A lead-lined coffin with holes bored in the bottom of it. That was curious, to say the least.

When I’d moved it far enough out, I started on the screws. They were brass and very heavy, but so was the screwdriver I’d taken from MacDonald’s store. And at the back of my mind was the thought that if the knock-out drops Dr Marston had provided for the sentry were in any way ineffective as the anæsthetic he had given me, then the sentry would be waking up any minute now. If he hadn’t already come to. I had that coffin lid off in no time at all.

Beneath the lid was not the satin shroud or silks I would have expected, but a filthy old blanket. In the generalissimo’s country, perhaps, their customs with coffins were different from ours. I pulled of the blanket and found I was right. Their customs were on occasion, different. The corpse, in this case consisted of blocks of amatol – each block was clearly marked with the word, so there was no mistake about it – a primer, a small case of detonators and a compact square box with wires leading from it, a timing device probably.

Susan was peering over my shoulder. “What’s amatol?”

“High explosive. Enough here to blow the Campari apart.”

She asked nothing else. I replaced the blanket, screwed on the lid and started on the next coffin. This too, had holes in the under side, probably to prevent the explosive sweating. I removed the lid, looked at the contents and replaced the lid. Number two was a duplicate of number one. And then I started on the third one. The one with the plaque. This would be the one. The plaque was heart-shaped and read with impressive simplicity: “Richard Hoskins. Senator.” Just that. Senator of what I didn’t know. But impressive. Impressive enough to ensure its reverent transportation to the United States. I removed the lid with care, gentleness and as much respectful reverence as if Richard Hoskins actually were inside, which I knew he wasn’t.

Whatever lay inside was covered with a rug. I lifted the rug gingerly, Susan brought the lantern nearer, and there it lay, cushioned in blankets and cotton wool. A polished aluminium cylinder, 75 inches in length, 11 inches in diameter, with a whitish pyroceram nose-cap. Just lying there, there was something frightening about it, something unutterably evil: but perhaps that was just because of what was in my own mind.

“What is it?” Susan’s voice was so low that she had to come closer to repeat the words. “Oh, Johnny, what in the world is it?”

“The Twister.”

“The – the what ?”

“The Twister.”

“Oh, dear God!” She had it now. “This – this atomic device that was stolen in South Carolina. The Twister.” She rose unsteadily to her feet and backed away. “The Twister!”

“It won’t bite you,” I said. I didn’t feel too sure about that either. “The equivalent of five thousand tons of TNT. Guaranteed to blast any ship on earth into smithereens, if not actually vapories. And that’s just what Carreras intends to do.”

“I – I don’t understand.” Maybe she was referring to the actual hearing of the words – our talk was continually being punctuated by the screeching of metal and the sounds of wood being crushed and snapped – or to the meaning of what I was saying. “You – when he gets the gold from the Ticonderoga and trans-ships it to this vessel he has standing by, he’s going to blow up the Campari – with this?”

“There is no ship standing by. There never was. When he’s loaded the gold aboard, the kindhearted Miguel Carreras is going to free all the passengers and crew of the Campari and let them sail off in the Fort Ticonderoga . As a further mark of his sentimentality and kindness he’s going to ask Senator Hoskins here and his two presumably illustrious companions to be taken back for burial in their native land. The captain of the Ticonderoga would never dream of refusing – and, if it came to the bit, Carreras would make certain that he damn’ well didn’t refuse. See that?” I pointed to a panel near the tail of the Twister.

“Don’t touch it!” If you can imagine anyone screaming in a whisper, then that’s what she did.

“I wouldn’t touch it for all the money in the Ticonderoga ,” I assured her fervently. “I’m even scared to look at the damn’ thing. Anyway, that panel is almost certainly a timing device which will be pre-set before the coffin is trans-shipped. We sail merrily on our way, hell-bent for Norfolk, the Army, Navy, Air Force, FBI and what have you – for Carreras’s radio stooges aboard the Ticonderoga will make good and certain that the radios will be smashed and we’ll have no means of sending a message. Half an hour, an hour after leaving the Campari – an hour, at least, I should think, even Carreras wouldn’t want to be within miles of an atomic device going up – well, it would be quite a bang.”

“He’ll never do it – never.” The emphatic voice didn’t carry the slightest shred of conviction. “The man must be a fiend.”

“Grade one,” I agreed. “And don’t talk rubbish about his not doing it. Why do you think they stole the Twister and made it appear as if Dr. Slingsby Caroline had lit out with it?