Leslie Charteris - The Saint Overboard

"Lower slowly."

The grab descended again, while he strained against it — the Falkenberg was not quite vertically overhead, and the five or six feet which the load had to be held out seemed like a hundred yards. He kept his weight thrusting against it till it was below the lip of the hole, and presently Vogel gave the order to stop. Simon recovered his balance with an effort. He could feel a prickle of sweat breaking out over his body, and his vision seemed to have become obscured. He realised that a film of steam had condensed inside the glass panel of his helmet; and he opened the air cock on the left of his helmet and sucked in a mouthful of water, blowing it out over the glass as Ivaloff had told him to do that afternoon. It ran down into the collar of the dress, and he could see better.

The claw opened when Vogel gave the word, and presently came up again empty. Simon helped it over the edge of the hole and let it go by. He tried to estimate how much had gone down on its first voyage. Half a million? A million? It was difficult to calculate, but even the roughest guess staggered the imagination. It is one thing to talk airily in such astronomical figures; it is something else again to see them made concrete and tangible, to push and toil against a load of solid wealth which even a millionaire himself might never see. It dawned upon the Saint that he had always been too modest in his ambitions. With all his fame and success, with all the amazing coups which he had engineered and seen blazoned across the front pages of the world's press, he had never touched anything that was not beggared by this prodigious plunder of which the annals of loot might never see the like again.

But he could judge time better than he could judge the value of bar gold. About four minutes, he concluded, was all that went by between the time when the grab vanished empty out of the light and the time when it came sinking down again with the second load. Therefore it would be wise to prepare the setting for the last scene at once.

Again he toiled and struggled to steer the laden grab over the hole. But this time, as soon as it had gone below his reach, he groped round for Vogel's life-line and drew down a fathom of slack from the hands that held it up on the deck.

Then he took the keen heavy-bladed diver's knife out of its sheath on his belt.

He knew exactly what he was doing; but he was without pity. He thought of Professor Yule, with the winch inactive and the oxygen failing, waiting for death in the grey-green darkness of the Hurd Deep, while his voice spoke through the loud speaker in the blessed light and air without fear. He remembered himself standing in the wreck of the Chalfont Castle, waiting with a cold and cynical detachment for the monotonous chuffing of the air driving into his helmet to give place to the last silence in which death would come. He remembered Loretta, and the price for which he had done Vogel's work — a price which she had chosen, he knew now, a different way to pay. And he was without pity. In his own way, in all his buccaneering, he had been just; and it seemed to him that this was justice.

He began to cut through the fibres of Vogel's life-line.

Load after load of gold came down, and he had to put his knife away while he fought it over to the hold and held it clear while it went down to Vogel; but in the four-minute intervals between those spasms of back-breaking labour he sawed away at the tough manila with his heart cold and passionless as iron. He cut through Vogel's life-line until only the telephone wires were left intact. Then he cut through his own line till it only hung together by the same slender link. When he had finished, either line could be severed completely with one powerful slash of the knife-blade. It had to be done that way; because while the loud speaker would not tell which line a voice came over, and the telephonic distortion combined with the reverberation inside the helmet would make it practically impossible to identify the voice, the man who held the other ends of the lines would still know which was which when the time came to haul them up.

Altogether six loads came down, and the Saint's nerves were strained to the uttermost pitch of endurance while he waited for the last two of those loads. Even then, he could still lose everything; he could still die down there and leave Loretta helpless, with the only satisfaction of knowing that Kurt Vogel at least would never gloat over his defeat or her surrender. If the helmsman recovered too soon from the volcanic punch under the jaw… He rubbed his cold right fist in the palm of his left, hand, wondering. His knuckles were still sore and his wrist still ached from the concussion; he was sure that never in his life had he struck such a blow. And yet, if Fate still had the cards stacked against him… He wondered what sort of a bargain he could strike, with Vogel at his mercy down there…

"That's all."

It must have been Arnheim's voice. The Saint heard it through a sort of muffling fog for which the acoustics of the helmet could not have been entirely responsible. He saw that the empty grab was coming up out of the pit for the last time. It bumped over the rocky floor, swung clear, and rose up under the steadily blazing lamp. The gold was all down, and only the account remained for settlement.

The thudding beat of the Saint's pulses which had crept up imperceptibly to a pounding crescendo during those last minutes of nerve-splitting suspense suddenly died down. Only then did he become aware, from the void left by its cessation, that it had ever reached such a height. But his blood ran as cool and smooth as a river of liquid ice as he folded Vogel's telephone wires over his knife-blade and snapped them through with one powerful jerk of his arm.

Quietly and steadily as if he had been dressing himself in costume for a dance, he brought the end of Vogel's lifeline round his own waist and knotted it in a careful bowline. He spoke into the telephone in a sufficient imitation of the flat rhythm of Vogel's accent.

"Wait a moment."

He drew down some more of his own life-line and hitched it round a jagged spur of granite above the cut he had made in it, so that it would still be anchored there after he broke the telephone wires.

The top of Vogel's helmet was coming to the surface as he climbed up the ladder.

Simon went down on one knee at the edge of the hole. His right hand dabbed round and found a large loose stone, twice the size of his fist. He picked it up.

"No," he said, still speaking with Vogel's intonation. "You stay here. I have something else for you to do. I shall come down again in a few minutes."

Vogel's hand came over the top of the hole and clutched for a hold. His head rose above the surface, and he waved the Saint impatiently back to make room for him to clamber out.

Simon did not move.

The broken end of Vogel's life-line trailed away from its lashing on his helmet, but he did not seem to have noticed it. His head turned up towards the light, and his lips moved in some words which no one would ever hear.

The Saint stayed where he was.

Perhaps it was the fact that he received no answer to whatever he had said that started the first wild and ghastly doubt in Vogel's mind. Perhaps it was the absolute immobility of the grotesque shape crouching over him. Whatever it may have been, he stopped. And then he brought his helmet slowly nearer to the Saint's, until barely six inches separated their front windows.

The Saint let him look. It had never been part of his plan that Vogel should be spared that final revelation. For the first time he held up his head and turned it so that the other could get a straight view into his helmet. The light above them reflected into his face from Vogel's upturned casque and filtered through the side panels to outline his features. The effect must still have been dim and shadowy, but at that close range it would still be recognisable.