Алистер Маклин - The Golden Rendezvous

“The Twister!” Her voice was urgent, compelling, desperate. “He armed the Twister!”

“What! What are you saying?” This time she had got through. “The Twister? Armed?” The voice malignant as ever, but I thought I detected overtones of fear.

“Yes, Carreras, armed!” I’d never known before how important lubrication of the throat and mouth was to the human voice, a buzzard with tonsilitis had nothing on my croak. “Armed, Carreras, armed!” The repetition was not for emphasis. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, how to carry this off, how to exploit the few seconds’ grace Susan had brought from me. I shifted the hand that was propping me up, the one in the black shadow behind me, as if to brace myself against the pitching of the Campari . My fingers closed over the handle of the hammer I’d dropped. I wondered bleakly what I was going to do with it. The torch and gun were steady as ever.

“You’re lying, Carter.” The confidence was back in his voice. “God knows how you found out about it, but you’re lying: you don’t know how to arm it.”

That was it: keep him talking, just keep him talking.

“I don’t. But Dr. Slingsby Caroline does.”

That shook him, literally. The torch wavered. But it didn’t waver enough.

“How do you know about Dr. Caroline?” he demanded hoarsely. His voice was almost a shout. “How do you–”

“I was speaking to him tonight,” I said calmly.

“Speaking with him! But – there’s a key to arm this. The only key to arm it. And my father has it.”

“Dr. Caroline has a spare. In his tobacco pouch. You never thought to look, did you, Carreras?” I sneered.

“You’re lying,” he repeated mechanically. Then, more strongly: “Lying, I say, Carter! I saw you tonight. I saw you leave the sick bay – my God, do you think I was so stupid as not to get suspicious when I saw the sentry drinking coffee given him by kind-hearted Carter – locked it up, followed you to the radio office and then down to Caroline’s cabin. But you never went inside, Carter. I lost you then for a few minutes, I admit. But you never went inside.”

“Why didn’t you stop us earlier?”

“Because I wanted to find out what you were up to. I found it.”

“So he’s the person we thought we saw!” I said to Susan. The conviction in my voice astonished even myself. “You poor fool, we noticed something in the shadows and left in a hurry. But we went back, Carreras, oh, yes, we went back. To Dr. Caroline. And we didn’t waste any time talking to him, either. We had a far smarter idea than that. Miss Beresford wasn’t quite accurate. I didn’t arm the Twister. Dr. Caroline himself did that.” I smiled and shifted my eyes from the beam of the torch to a spot behind and to the right of Carreras. “Tell him Doctor.”

Carreras half turned, cursed viciously, swung back. His mind was fast, his reactions faster, he’d hardly even begun to fall for the old gag. All he allowed us was a second of time and in that brief moment I hadn’t even got past tightening my grip on the hammer. And now he was going to kill me.

But he couldn’t get his gun lined up. Susan had been waiting for the chance, she sensed I’d been building up towards the chance, she dropped her lantern and flung herself forward even as Carreras started to turn and she had only about three feet to go. Now she was clinging desperately to his gun arm, all her weight on it, forcing it down towards the floor. I twisted myself convulsively forward and that two-pound hammer came arching over my shoulder and flew straight for Carreras’s face with all the power, all the hatred and viciousness that was in me.

He saw it coming. His left hand, still gripping the torch, was raised high to smash down on the unprotected nape of Susan’s neck. He jerked his head sideways, flung out his left arm in instinctive reaction: the hammer caught him just below the left elbow with tremendous force, his torch went flying through the air and the hold was plunged into absolute darkness. Where the hammer went I don’t know: a heavy crate screeched and rumbled across the floor just at that moment and I never heard it land.

The crate ground to a standstill. In the sudden momentary silence I could hear the sound of struggling, of heavy breathing. I was slow in getting to my feet, my left leg was practically useless, but maybe it only seemed slow to me. Fear, when it is strong enough, has the curious effect of slowing up time. And I was afraid. I was afraid for Susan. Carreras, except as the source of menace to her, didn’t exist for me at that moment. Only Susan: he was a big man, a powerful man, he could break her neck with a single wrench, kill her with a single blow.

I heard her cry out, a cry of shock or fear. A moment’s silence, a heavy soft thump as of falling bodies, a scream of agony from Susan, and then that silence again.

They weren’t there. When I reached the spot where they had been struggling, they weren’t there. For a second I stood still in that impenetrable darkness, bewildered, then my hand touched the top of the three-foot baffle and I had it: In their wrestling on that crazily careening deck they’d staggered against the baffle and toppled over on to the floor of the hold. I was over that baffle before I had time to think, before I knew what I was doing: the bo’sun’s knife was in my hand, the needle-pointed marlinespike open, the locking shackle closed.

I stumbled as the weight came on my left leg, fell to my knees, touched someone’s head and hair. Long hair. Susan. I moved away, and had just reached my feet again when he came at me. He came at me. He didn’t back away, try to keep out of my reach in that darkness. He came at me. That meant he’d lost his gun.

We fell to the floor together, clawing, clubbing, kicking. Once, twice, half a dozen times he caught me on the chest, the side of the body, with sledgehammer short-arm jabs that threatened to break my ribs. But I didn’t really feel them. He was a strong man, tremendously strong, but even with all his great strength, even had his left arm not been paralysed and useless, he would have found no escape that night.

I grunted with the numbing shock of it and Carreras shrieked out in agony as the hilt of MacDonald’s knife jarred solidly home against his breast-bone. I wrenched the knife free and struck again. And again. And again. After the fourth blow he didn’t cry out any more.

Carreras died hard. He’d stopped hitting me now, his right arm was locked round my neck, and with every blow I struck the throttling pressure of his arm increased. All the convulsive strength of a man dying in agony was being brought to bear on exactly that spot where I had been so heavily sandbagged. Pain, crippling pain, red-hot barbed lances of fire shot through my back and head, I thought my neck was going to break. I struck again. And then the knife fell from my hand.

When I came to, the blood was pounding dizzily in my ears, my head felt as if it were going to burst, my lungs were heaving and gasping for air that wouldn’t come. I felt as if I were choking, being slowly and surely suffocated.

And then I dimly realised the truth. I was being suffocated, the arm of the dead man, by some freak of muscular contraction, was still locked around my neck. I couldn’t have been out for long, not for more than a minute. With both hands I grasped his arm by the wrist and managed to tear it free from my neck. For thirty seconds, perhaps longer, I lay there stretched out on the floor of the hold, my heart pounding, gasping for breath as waves of weakness and dizziness washed over me, while some faraway insistent voice, as desperately urgent as it was distant, kept saying in this remote corner of my mind, you must get up, you must get up.