Алистер Маклин - The Golden Rendezvous

Bullen was awake now, lying flat on his back, his face silent and grim.

I was dressed in the same dinner suit as I’d worn the previous night. It was still damp, still crusted with blood. I’d no shoes on. The clasp-knife was in one pocket, oilskin-wrapped torch in the other, the mask round my face, hood over my head. My leg ached, I felt as a man feels after a long bout of ’ flu and the fever still burned in my blood: but I was as ready as I ever was going to be.

“Lights,” I said to Marston.

A switch clicked and the sick-bay was dark as the tomb. I drew back the curtains, pulled open the window and secured it on the latch. I stuck my head outside.

It was raining steadily, heavily, a cold driving rain out of the north-west, slanting straight in through the window on to the bed. The sky was black with no star above. The Campari still pitched a little, rolled a little, but it was nothing as compared with the previous night. She was doing about twelve knots. I twisted my neck and peered upwards. No one there. I leaned out as far as possible and looked fore and aft. If there was a light showing on the Campari that night I couldn’t see it.

I came inside, stooped, picked up a coil of nylon rope, checked that it was the one secured to the top of the iron bedstead and flung it out into the rain and the darkness. I made a last check of the rope knotted round my waist – this was the one the bo’sun held in his hands – and said: “I’m off.” As a farewell speech it could perhaps have been improved upon, but it was all I could think of at the time.

Captain Bullen said: “Good luck, my boy.” He’d have said an awful lot more if he knew what I really had in mind. Marston said something I couldn’t catch. Susan said nothing at all. I wriggled my way through the window, favouring my wounded leg, and then was fully outside, suspended from the sill by my elbows. I could sense rather than see the bo’sun by the window, ready to pay out the rope round my waist.

“Archie,” I said softly. “Give me that spiel again. The one about how everything is going to turn out all right.”

“You’ll be here again before we know you’re gone,” he said cheerfully. “See and bring my knife back.”

I felt for the rope attached to the bed, got it in both hands, eased my elbows off the sill and dropped quickly, hand over hand, as MacDonald paid out my lifeline. Five seconds later I was in the water.

The water was dark and cold and it took my breath away. After the warmth of the sick-bay the shock of the almost immediate transition, the abrupt drop in temperature, was literally paralysing. Momentarily, involuntarily, I lost my grip on the rope, panicked when I realised what had happened, floundered about desperately and caught it again. The bo’sun was doing a good job above: the sudden increase in weight as I’d lost my lifeline must have had him half-way out of the window.

But the cold wasn’t the worst. If you can survive the initial shock you can tolerate the cold to a limited degree, accustomed but not reconciled: what you can’t tolerate, what you can’t become accustomed to is the involuntary swallowing of large mouthfuls of salt water every few seconds. And that was what was happening to me.

I had known that being towed alongside a ship doing twelve knots wasn’t going to be any too pleasant, but I had never thought it was going to be as bad as this. The factor I hadn’t taken into the reckoning was the waves. One moment I was being towed, face down and planing, up the side of a wave: the next, as the waves swept by under me, I was almost completely out of the water, then falling forwards and downwards to smash into the rising shoulder of the next wave with a jarring violence that knocked all the breath from my body. And when all the breath has been driven from you the body’s demands that you immediately gulp in air are insistent, imperative and not to be denied. But with my face buried in the sea I wasn’t gulping in air, I was gulping down large quantities of salt water. It was like having water under high pressure forced down my throat by a hose. I was floundering, porpoising, twisting and spinning exactly like a hooked fish being pulled in on the surface through the wake of a fast-trolling motorboat. Slowly, but very surely, I was drowning.

I was beaten before I started. I knew I had to get back, and at once, I was gasping and choking on sea-water, my nostrils were on fire with it, my mouth was full of it, my stomach was full of it, my throat burned with it and I knew that at least some of it had already reached my lungs.

A system of signals had been arranged, and now I began to tug frantically on the rope round my waist, hanging on to the other rope with my left hand. I tugged half a dozen times, slowly, in some sort of order at first, then, as no response came, frantically, despairingly. Nothing happened. I was porpoising up and down so violently that all MacDonald could be feeling anyway was a constant and irregular series of alternate tightenings and slackenings of the line: he had no means of distinguishing between one type of tug and another.

I tried to pull myself back on my own line, but against the onrushing pressure of the water as the Campari ploughed through that stormy sea, it was quite impossible. When the tension came off the line round my waist, it needed all the strength of both my hands just to hang on to the lifeline without being swept away. With all the strength and desperation that was in me I tried to edge forward an inch. But I couldn’t even make that inch. And I knew I couldn’t hang on much longer.

Salvation came by sheer chance: no credit to me. One particularly heavy wave had twisted me round till I was on my back, and in this position I fell into the next trough and hit the following wave with back and shoulders. Followed the inevitable explosive release of air from my lungs, the just as inevitable sucking in of fresh air – and this time I found I could breathe! Air rushed into my lungs, not water: I could breathe! Lying on my back like this, half lifted out of the water by my grip on the lifeline and with my head bent forward almost to my chest between my overhead arms, my face remained clear of the water and I could breathe.

I wasted no time but went hand over hand down the lifeline as fast as MacDonald paid out the rope about my waist. I was still swallowing some water, but not enough to matter.

After about fifteen seconds I took my left hand off the lifeline and started scraping it along the side of the ship, feeling for the rope I’d left dangling over the side of the after-deck last night. The lifeline was now sliding through my right hand and, wet though it was, it was burning the skin off my palm. But I hardly noticed it. I had to find that manilla I’d left tied to the guard-rail stanchion: if I didn’t, then it was curtains. Not only would the hopes of my carrying out my plan be at an end, it would be the end of me also. MacDonald and I had had to act on the assumption that the rope would be there and no attempt would be made to pull me back until he got the clear pre-arranged-signal that it was time to begin just that. And to make any such clear signal while in the water, I had discovered, was impossible. If the manilla wasn’t there I’d just be towed along at the end of that nylon rope until I drowned. Nor would that take long. The salt water I’d swallowed, the violent buffeting of the waves, the blows I’d suffered from being flung a score of times against the iron walls of the Campari , the loss of blood and my injured leg – all those had taken their frightening toll and I was dangerously weak. It would not be long.

My left hand brushed against the manilla: I grabbed it, a drowning man seizing the last straw in the whole endless expanse of the ocean.