Лесли Чартерис - Salvage for the Saint

“Templar!” Lebec roared. “Stop! As a police officer I command you to stop!”

The error was pardonable, as Lebec had no way of knowing that the Saint was still at the bottom of the sea.

The seat cushions on the launch were still smouldering, but the fire had done no serious damage. Lebec barked a new order at his crewman; and as the man complied the diesel engines of the launch awoke to drumming life.

“Allez! Vite!” Lebec snapped, stabbing an outraged finger in the direction of the Phoenix as she headed for the open sea. “After him! Templar shall not get away with the gold!”

He flung himself on the anchor cable and hauled. At first the rope began to come easily aboard as Lebec took up the slack; then the rope tautened, stretched, and held fast.

With a string of Gallic profanities Lebec shouted another order. The man said something back, and Lebec took over the helm and opened the throttle. The launch’s propeller churned the water into a froth; and its nose tilted up as it strained against the creaking wet rope that tethered it. But it remained tethered; and the enraged Lebec frantically piled on more power as he watched the Phoenix heading out to sea.

Down below, in what he had accepted would soon become his sodden sepulchre, Simon Templar had heard the last hiss of air released by his tanks. Then there was nothing left but to re-breathe what remained in the tubes and in his face mask.

A stubborn instinctive will to live compelled him to try to make it last as long as possible by controlled shallow breathing, even though common sense told him that it could only postpone oblivion by a few futile minutes.

His ribs ached, and a kind of merciful red mist came up before his eyes to distance him from what was happening in the final seconds...

As the red mist darkened, somewhere above him a man at the helm of a boat switched to reverse gear and crammed on full power again, and held the throttle wide open while the turbulent water boiled around the boat with a frustrated churning of the screws, and a suffocating fog of diesel fumes engulfed it.

Simon Templar did not hear the straining of the stretched anchor rope, nor the slow sucking and splintering and rending sound made by the rotten timbers of the sunken wreck as the sustained traction on the tethered cable pulled it apart. Nor was he conscious enough to see clearly the gaping aperture of greenish light that opened up like a heaven above his head as the stern-rail and a torn-off section of deck were dragged slowly upward. It could only have been by blind reflexes that he groped his way out and up towards that light, strengthened by some reawakened spark of hope which had defiantly survived in him.

And then, as he broke surface, the feel of air on his skin must have brought consciousness briefly back to him. At any rate, something told him to tear off his face mask and take two great gulping gasping breaths, as hands reached down from the launch to bring him aboard, before the mist came up in front of his eyes again and became an infinite and engulfing black void.

Simon Templar opened his eyes again in tentative incredulity, to regard the back of Inspector Gerard Lebec’s head. Objectively speaking it was nothing remarkable, as the backs of heads went; but to the Saint it was indubitably one of the most beautiful sights he had ever seen.

He shifted his glance, and met the blue gaze and concerned expression of Arabella Tatenor. He was lying across two of the seats in the cabin of the launch, with his head resting in her lap; and the Saint had never before felt so utterly amazed and overwhelmed to be alive.

The gold on the deck of the fleeing Phoenix was for that moment a dream forgotten as completely as if it had never been. Even the world that impinged directly on his senses had the lambent quality of a fantasy; and he looked around him with a fresh-eyed wonderment. It was the unbelievable fantasy of a world which he had just given up as irrevocably lost. Never before had life seemed so overflowing with the sensory riches of the moving present that was now, and never before had the seed of that present seemed to hold such an infinite burgeoning of promise for the future. Just to be alive was a fabulous wine of contentment, and at that moment he wanted nothing more than to remain utterly immersed in it.

He hooked an arm up slowly behind Arabella’s red-gold head and drew her down gently for a kiss. And this too was an astonishment and a fantasy — this woman, ripe and beautiful and tender, who gave herself willingly to his kiss, and returned it...

And then abruptly, almost with an audible click, he was fully back in life again. The sky and the sea and Arabella and Lebec and the man at the helm of the launch somersaulted dizzily back into their familiar perspective in the real world; and now it was the last place he had been to, on the murky margins of annihilation that was the fantasy, fading into a blurred and receding memory of life surrendering to death.

Then, with that return of his normal mind, he thought of the man who had locked him up under the sea — the man who had slammed down and secured the hatch and left him down there alone to suffocate and die in the darkness. And if ever iron entered into a man’s soul, it entered into the soul of Simon Templar then.

There was no justice he could imagine subscribing to which would not make the perpetrator of that action pay for it in the very same coin — the coin of life. For the Saint, there could be no other possible price, and no other acceptable executioner but himself; and he knew that, whatever else might happen, he would do everything in his power to carry out the sentence, and that when the time came he would do it unflinchingly and without compunction.

Now he gazed forward across the sea, and saw the Phoenix ahead against the pink glow on the western horizon where the sun had gone down not long before. The Phoenix had perhaps four hundred yards on them, and the launch was closing the gap fast.

Lebec turned to him.

“So you have recovered, Monsieur Templar. Are you able to tell us — who is the diver? Who is that man driving the Phoenix?”

Simon’s eyes were chips of frozen sapphire as he thought of that driver — that man.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “But I mean to find out, just as soon as you can catch up and get this tub close enough for me to jump on board.”

While the launch steadily ate up the Phoenix’s lead, Simon sketched in the bare essentials of what had happened in those final few minutes on the sea bed. Lebec listened attentively, his pale green eyes appraising the Saint’s lean and dangerous form; and he must have drawn his own conclusions from what he saw.

Perhaps the hard-set fighting line of the Saint’s mouth and the flinty resolution in his eyes made his intentions only too plain. Not that he had made any special attempt to conceal them. But at any rate, Lebec abruptly drew his automatic with the air of a man who had made up his mind about a point which had been worrying him.

“Monsieur Templar,” he said, “you will not be permitted to step on to the Phoenix until after I have dealt with this man. You will remain here — and Madame also, for her own safety.”

At a word from Lebec the crewman drew his own gun and pointed it at the Saint. And Simon was glumly obliged to admit its controlling power, and to remain where he was while the launch drew level with the Phoenix’s port quarter.

The crewman manoeuvred the launch close in, and Lebec stood up on the rail to make the short jump across the after deck. And in that instant the Saint knew that, come what might, this was one party he couldn’t bear to miss.