Алистер Маклин - Goodbye California

‘I get to finish my thesis? A doctorate, no less?’

‘I’ll come to your graduation ceremony. Jeff, Colonel Greenshaw, Mr Harlinson: there are armed guards out in the courtyard. I don’t care how much noise you make. Kill them.’

‘Dad!’ Jeff’s face was white and shocked and beseeching.

‘Give that Kalashnikov to Bonn. Those people would have killed a million, millions, of your fellow Californians.’

‘But God! Dad!’

‘Your mother…’

Jeff left. Greenshaw and Harlinson followed. Bonn and Ryder moved out after them into the corridor, and it was then that Ryder made his first mistake since his grouchy lieutenant had called him at home to inform him of the San Ruffino break-in. It wasn’t a mistake, really; he had no idea where Morro and Dubois had taken Hillary. It was just that he was extremely tired. He normally would have taken into account the possibility that Morro had gone to a room between where he stood and the elevator to the caverns below. But he was very, very tired. To all the world he looked like a man of indestructible iron. But no man is indestructible. No man is made of iron.

He listened to the stuttering bark of the Kalashnikovs and wondered whether Jeff would ever forgive him. Probably not, he thought, probably not, and it was little consolation to know that millions of Californians would. If. Not yet. The time was not yet.

Fifteen feet down the corridor to his right Dubois, gun in hand, came out, followed by Morro dragging Hillary with him. Ryder lifted his Kalashnikov and Dubois died. It was impossible to see where the bullet had struck and Ryder had not pressed the trigger. The future doctor of philosophy was still earning his degree.

Morro was moving away, dragging his human shield with him. The elevator gate was less than fifteen feet away.

‘Stay here,’ Ryder said. His voice was strangely quiet. ‘Watch out to the left.’ He switched the Kalashnikov to single-shot and squeezed the trigger. He didn’t want to do it, he hated to do it. Hillary had cheerfully admitted that he was expendable, but he still remained, as he had proved that night, a strangely likeable human being. Brave, cheerful, courageous and human: but so were millions of Californians.

The bullet hit Morro’s left shoulder. He didn’t shriek or cry, he just grunted and kept on dragging Hillary to the elevator. The gate was open. He thrust Hillary in and was disappearing himself when the second bullet struck him in the thigh, and this time he did cry out. Any ordinary man with a smashed femur either passes into unconsciousness or waits for an ambulance to come; after the initial impact of a serious wound there is no great pain, just a numbed shock: the pain comes later. But Morro, as the world now knew, was no ordinary man; the elevator gate closed and the sound of its whining descent was proof enough that Morro still had the awareness to find the descent button.

Ryder reached the blanked face of the shaft and stopped. For a second, two, three, all he could think of was Morro making his way towards the apocalyptic button. Then he remembered what Healey had said. Stairs.

They were only ten feet away and unlit. There had to be a light, but he did not know where the switch was. He stumbled down the first flight in total darkness and fell heavily as he struck a wall. There were flights of stairs. He turned right, found the next flight and this time was careful enough to anticipate the end of them. Automatically, as many people do, he had counted the number of steps to a flight. Thirteen. Good old Ryder, he thought savagely, even a boy scout would have thought to bring a flash-light. The third flight he negotiated with all the careful speed at his command. The fourth was easy, for it was awash with light.

The lift was there, its door open, a dazed Hillary sitting against one side and massaging the back of his head. He didn’t see Ryder and Ryder didn’t see him. Ahead were a series of what appeared to be caverns. The fourth, Healey had said, the fourth. Ryder reached the fourth, and then he saw Morro inside the little plywood booth hauling himself to his feet, a key in his hand. He must have been dragging himself along the floor like a wounded animal, for all life in his leg had gone and the agonizing progress he had made was clearly limned by the track of blood.

Morro fumbled with the key and had the door open. He lurched inside, an insane dreamer in an insane dreamer’s world. Ryder lifted his Kalashnikov. There was no dramatic urgency. There was time.

Ryder said: ‘Stop, Morro, stop! Please stop.’

Morro was dreadfully injured. By that time his mind must have been in the same way. But, even if he had been well both in body and mind he would probably have acted in the same way: sick or in health, for the mercifully few Morros in the world, fanaticism is their sole sustaining power, the well-spring of their being.

Morro had, incredibly, reached a calibrated, dialled metallic box and was beginning to unscrew a transparent plastic cover that housed a red knob. Ryder was still ten feet away, too far away to stop him.

He switched the Kalashnikov’s slide from single-shot to automatic…

Susan said: ‘How can you bear to drink that dreadful man’s whisky?’

‘Any port in a storm.’ Susan was both crying and shaking, a combination Ryder had never seen before. He tightened his arm around his daughter who was sitting on the other arm of his chair and nodded across Morro’s office where Burnett was conducting a seminar. ‘What’s good enough for a professor–’

‘Do be quiet. You know, I rather like the way you look. Maybe you should stay that way.’

Ryder sipped some more Glenfiddich in silence.

She said: ‘I’m sorry in a way. Okay, he was a fiend. But he was a kindly fiend.’

Ryder knew how to keep the one person in the world. He kept silent.

‘End of a nightmare,’ Susan said. ‘Happy ever after.’

‘Yes. The first chopper should be here in ten minutes. And bed for you, young lady. Happy ever after? That’s as maybe. Perhaps we’ll be as lucky as Myron Bonn there, and have a stay of execution. Perhaps not. I don’t know. Somewhere out there in the darkness the monster is still crouched on the doorstep, waiting.’

‘What on earth do you mean, John? You never talk like that.’

‘True. Something a professor in CalTech said. I think maybe we should go and live in New Orleans.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘They’ve never had an earthquake there.’

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.

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. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.