Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

Let him wait: eternity was too long for me to worry about.

They hadn’t sentenced Vyland, for they never even had the chance to try him. On the way up the caisson from the bathyscaphe, 170 steps from the bottom, Vyland had simply let go his grip on the ladder and leaned back into space: he hadn’t even screamed on the long way down.

I passed the general and his wife on the steps. I had met Mrs Ruthven for the first time on my first day out of hospital, which had been yesterday. She had been very charming and gracious and endlessly grateful. They had offered me everything, from a job at the top of the tree in Ruthven’s oil companies to enough money to last any man half a dozen lifetimes, but I just smiled and thanked them and turned them all down. There was nothing in them for me, all the fancy directorships and money in the world couldn’t buy me back the days that were gone. And money couldn’t buy the only thing I wanted out of the world today.

Mary Ruthven was standing on the sidewalk beside her father’s sand and beige Rolls-Royce. She was dressed in a plain white, simple one-piece dress that couldn’t have cost more than a thousand bucks, her braided wheat-coloured hair was piled high on her head and I had never seen her looking so lovely. Behind her was Kennedy. For the first time I saw him dressed in a lounge suit, dark blue and immaculately cut, and when you saw him like that it was impossible to imagine him any other way. His chauffeuring days were over: the general knew how much the Ruthven family owed him and you couldn’t pay a debt like that with chauffeur’s wages. I wished him all the luck in the world: he was a nice guy.

I halted at the foot of the steps. A little wind was blowing in from the blue sparkling shimmer that was the Gulf of Mexico, sending tiny little dust devils and small pieces of paper dancing across the street.

Mary saw me, hesitated a moment, then came across the sidewalk to where I was standing. Her eyes seemed dark and curiously blurred but maybe I was imagining it. She murmured something, I couldn’t make out what it was, then suddenly, careful not to hurt my left arm still in its sling, she put her two arms round my neck, pulled down my head and kissed me. Next moment she was gone, making her way back to the Rolls like a person who couldn’t see too well. Kennedy looked at her coming towards him, then lifted his eyes to mine, his face still and empty of all expression. I smiled at him and he smiled back. A nice guy.

I walked down the street, along towards the shore, and turned into a bar. I hadn’t intended to, I didn’t really need a drink, but the bar was there so I went in anyway. I had a couple of drinks, double Scotches, but it was just a waste of good liquor; I left and made my way down to a bench by the shore.

An hour, two hours, I don’t know how long I sat there. The sun sank down close to the rim of the ocean, the sea and the sky turned to orange and gold, and I could see, faintly on the horizon and weirdly silhouetted against this flaming backdrop, the massively grotesque angularity of the oil rig X 13.

X 13. I suppose that would always be a part of me now, that and the broken-winged DC that lay 580 yards to its south-west, buried under 480 feet of water. For better or for worse, it would always be part of me. For worse, I thought, for worse. It was all over and done with and empty now and it meant nothing, for that was all that was left.

The sun was on the rim of the sea now and the western world a great red flame, a flame that would soon be extinguished and vanish as if it had never been. And so it had been with my red rose, before it had turned to white.

The sun was gone and the night rushed across the sea. With the dark came the cold so I rose stiffly to my feet and walked back to the hotel.

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses , his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D.Litt from the same university.

He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra . Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.