Алистер Маклин - The Golden Rendezvous

Tucking the lifeline through the rope round my waist, I over-armed myself up the manilla till I was all but clear of the water, wrapped my one good leg round the rope and hung there, gasping like an exhausted dog, shivering and then being violently sick as I brought up all the sea-water that had collected in my stomach. After that I felt better, but weaker than ever. I started to climb.

I hadn’t far to go, twenty feet and I’d be there, but I hadn’t gone two feet before I was bitterly regretting the fact that I hadn’t followed my impulse of the previous night and knotted the manilla. The manilla was soaking wet and slippery and I had to clamp tight with all the strength of my hands to get any purchase at all. And there was little enough strength left in my hands, my aching forearm muscles were exhausted from clinging so long and so desperately to the lifeline: my shoulders were just as far gone, even when I could get a good purchase, even when my weakening hands didn’t slide down the rope when I put all my weight on them, I could still pull myself up only two or three inches at a time. Three inches, no more: that was all I could manage at one time.

I couldn’t make it, reason, instinct, logic, common sense all told me that I couldn’t make it: but I made it. The last few feet of the climb was something out of a dark nightmare, hauling myself up two inches, slipping back an inch, hauling myself up again and always creeping nearer the top. Three feet away from the top I stopped: I knew I was only that distance away from safety, but to climb another inch on that rope was something I knew I could never do. Arms shaking ague-like from the strain, shoulders on fire with agony, I hauled my body up until my eyes were level with knotted hands: even in that almost pitchy darkness I could see the faint white blur of my gleaming knuckles. For a second I hung there, then flung my right hand desperately upwards. If I missed the coaming of the scuppers … but I couldn’t miss it. I had no more strength in me, I could never make such an effort again.

I didn’t miss it. The top joint of my middle finger hooked over the coaming and locked there, then my other hand was beside it, I was scrabbling desperately for the lowermost bar in the guardrails, I had to get it over and over at once or I’d fall back into the sea. I found the bar, had both hands on it, swung my body convulsively to the right till my sound foot caught the coaming, reached up to the next bar, reached the teak rail, half dragged, half slid my body over the top and fell heavily on the deck on the other side.

How long I lay there, trembling violently in every weary muscle in my body, whooping hoarsely for the breath my tortured lungs were craving, gritting my teeth against the fire in my shoulders and arms, and trying not to let the red mist before my eyes envelop me completely, I do not know. It may have been two minutes, it may have been ten. Somewhere during that time I was violently ill again. And then slowly, ever so slowly, the pain eased a little, my breathing slowed and the mists before my eyes cleared away: but I still couldn’t stop trembling. It was well for me that no five-year-old happened along the deck that night: he could have had me over the side without taking his hands out of his pockets.

I untied the ropes from my waist with numbed and fumbling and all but useless hands, tied them both to the stanchion just above the manilla, pushed the lifeline till it was almost taut, then gave three sharp deliberate tugs. A couple of seconds passed, then came three clearly defined answering tugs. They knew now I had made it. I hoped they felt better about it than I did. Not that that would be hard.

I sat there for at least another five minutes till some measure of strength came back to me, rose shakily to my feet and padded across the deck to number four hold. The tarpaulin on the starboard forward corner was still secured. That meant there was no one down below. But I really hadn’t expected them to be there yet.

I straightened, looked all around me, then stood very still, the driving rain streaming down my sodden mask and soaking clothes. Not fifteen yards away from me, right aft, I had seen a red glow come and vanish in the darkness. Ten seconds passed, then the glow again. I’d heard of waterproof cigarettes, but not all that waterproof. But someone was smoking a cigarette, no question about that.

Like falling thistledown, only quieter, I drifted down in the direction of the glow. I was still trembling, but you can’t hear trembling. Twice I stopped to line up direction and distance by that glowing cigarette and finally stopped less than ten feet away from it. My mind was hardly working at all or I’d never have dared to do it: a careless flick of a torch beam, say, and it would have been all over. But no one flicked a torch.

The red glow came again, and I could now just make out that the smoker wasn’t standing in the rain. He was in the V-shaped entrance of a tarpaulin, a big tarpaulin draped over some big object. The gun, of course, the gun that Carreras had mounted on the after-deck, with the tarpaulin serving the dual purpose of protecting the mechanism from the rain and concealing it from any other vessel they might have passed during the day.

I heard the murmur of voices. Not the smoker, but another two crouched somewhere inside the shelter of the tarpaulin. That meant three people there. Three people guarding the gun. Carreras was certainly taking no chances with that gun. But why so many as three, he didn’t need three? Then I had it. Carreras hadn’t just been talking idly when he’d spoken of the possibility of foul play in connection with the death of his son. He did suspect it, but his cold logical mind had told him that neither crew nor passengers of the Campari could have been responsible. If his son had met death by violence, then death could only have come from one of his own men. The renegade who had killed his son might strike again, might attempt to ruin his plans. And so, three men on guard together. They could watch each other.

I left, skirted the hatch and made my way to the bo’sun’s store. I fumbled around in the darkness, found what I wanted, a heavy marline-spike, and then was on my way, marline-spike in one hand, MacDonald’s knife in the other.

Dr. Caroline’s cabin was in darkness. I was pretty sure that the windows were uncurtained, but I left my torch where it was. Susan had said that Carreras’s men were prowling around the decks that night: the chance wasn’t worth it. And if Dr. Caroline wasn’t already in number four hold, then the chances were high indeed that he would only be in one other place – in his bed, and bound to it hand and foot.

I climbed up to the next deck and padded along to the wireless office. My breathing and pulse were almost back to normal now, the shaking had eased and I could feel the strength slowly flooding back into my arms and shoulders. Apart from the constant dull ache in my neck where the sandbag merchant and Tony Carreras had been at work, the only pain I felt was a sharp burning in my left thigh where the salt water had got into the open wounds. Without the anæsthetic, I’d have been doing a war dance. On one leg, of course.

The wireless office was in darkness. I leaned my ear against the door, straining to hear the slightest sound from inside, and was just reaching out a delicate hand for the door-knob when I just about had a heart-attack. A telephone bell had gone off with a shattering metallic loudness not six inches from the ear I’d so hard pressed against the door. It jarred me rigid, for all of five seconds Lot’s wife couldn’t even have hoped to compete with me, then I pussy-footed silently across the deck into the shelter of one of the lifeboats.

I heard the vague murmur of someone talking on the telephone, saw the light come on in the wireless office, the door open and a man came out. Before he switched off the light I saw two things: I saw him bring a key from his right-hand trousers’ pocket, and I saw who it was, the artist with the machine-gun who had killed Tommy Wilson and cut down all the rest of us. If I had to settle any more accounts that night, I hoped bleakly it would be with this man.