Alistair MacLEAN: The Dark Crusader

‘You weren’t as smart as all that.’ I said slowly. I felt sick. ‘I don’t think you did suspect. What I did overlook was the certainty that you would take Hargreaves and Williams apart and threaten to kill their wives if they didn’t tell you everything that happened. Separate huts and the usual menaces if their stories didn’t tally exactly. Maybe I do underestimate you. So now you take me away somewhere quietly and shoot me. I don’t really think I’ll mind.’

‘Nobody’s going to shoot you, Bentall. Nobody’s going to shoot anybody. We’re leaving tomorrow and I can promise that when we do we will leave you all alive.’

‘Of course,’ I sneered. ‘How many years’ practice does it take, LeClerc, to get that ring of conviction into your voice when you tell your damned lies?’

‘You’ll see tomorrow.’

‘Always tomorrow. And how do you propose to keep forty of us under control until then?’ I hoped his mind worked as mine did, or I’d probably wasted my time in sending Griffiths to Fleck.

‘You gave us the idea yourself, Bentall. The blockhouse. You said it would make a fine dungeon. Escape proof. Besides, I want all my men for the job of crating the Crusader tonight and I don’t need guards for anyone inside the blockhouse.’ He looked at Hewell and smiled. ‘Incidentally, Bentall, I believe there is no love lost between yourself and Captain Griffiths. He was saying some pretty hard things about you for fusing up that first rocket.’

I said nothing. I waited for it.

‘You’ll be pleased to hear he’s met with a little trouble. Nothing serious. I gather he took it into his head to berate Captain Fleck – as one Englishman to another – for his treasonable activities. Fleck, one gathers, took exception to Griffiths taking exception. In age, height and weight the two master mariners were pretty evenly matched and if Captain Griffiths was a bit fitter Fleck knew more dirty tricks. It was a fight to see. Had to stop it eventually. Distracting my men.’

‘I hope they beat each other to death.’ I growled. LeClerc smiled, and walked away with Hewell. The world was going well for them.

It wasn’t for me. The booby-trap sprung, Griffiths and Fleck at blows, the last hope gone, Marie finished with me, LeClerc winning all along the line and a bullet in the head for Bentall any hour now. I felt sick and weak and exhausted and beaten. Maybe it was time to give up. I rolled over on my face again, saw Griffiths approaching. He sat where he had been sitting before. His shirt was dirty and torn, his forehead grazed and a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth.

‘Congratulations.’ I said bitterly.

‘They are in order,’ he said calmly. ‘Fleck believes me. It wasn’t difficult to convince him. He was on the other side of the island this morning and found a dead man – or what was left of him – a Fijian, I think, floating out near the reef. He thought it was sharks. He doesn’t now. His mate has gone to investigate.’

‘But – but the fight?’

‘LeClerc came out of the hangar. He was watching us closely, much too closely. It was the only way to kill suspicion.’ I looked up and he was smiling. ‘We managed to exchange quite a bit of information as we were rolling around.’

‘Captain Griffiths,’ I said, ‘you deserve a battleship for this.’

The sun sank down towards the sea. Two Chinese brought us some food, mostly tinned, and beer. I saw another couple take some across to the blockhouse where the seven women were still held, probably as additional security against our making trouble. Lieutenant Brookman fixed my arm again and he didn’t seem too happy with its condition. All afternoon the Chinese and about half the sailors, closely supervised by Hewell, were dismantling two gantries and setting them up on either side of the railway track in preparation for lifting the Crusader into its metal crate, which was already in position on a pair of bogies. And all the time I wondered about Marie in her loneliness, whether she was asleep or awake, how she felt, whether she thought about me, whether her despair was half as deep as mine.

Shortly before sunset Fleck and Henry came strolling along the sands from the other side of the pier. They stopped directly opposite me, Fleck with his legs spread and arms akimbo. Griffiths shook his fist at him, there would be no doubt in any watcher’s mind that another violent argument, verbal or otherwise, was about to begin. I rolled over on my right elbow, the most natural thing in the world if one heard two people arguing over one’s head. Fleck’s brown hard face was set and grim.

‘Henry found them all right.’ His voice was husky with anger. ‘Eleven. Dead. The rotten lying murderous devil.’ He swore bitterly and went on: ‘God knows I play rough, but not that rough. He told me they were prisoners, that I was to find them by accident tomorrow and take them back to Fiji.’

I said: ‘Do you think there’s going to be any tomorrow for you, Fleck? Don’t you see the armed sentry on the pier waiting to see you don’t make a break for it with your ship? Don’t you see you’ll have to go the same way as the rest. He can’t leave anyone behind who’ll talk.’

‘I know. But I’m all right, tonight anyway, I can sleep on my schooner tonight, a coaster from Fiji by the name of Grasshopper, and manned by the most murderous crew of Asiatics in the Pacific is coming here at dawn. I’ve got to pilot them through the reefs.’ For all his anger, Fleck was playing his part well, gesticulating violently with every second word.

‘What’s the coaster for?’ I asked.

‘Surely it’s obvious?’ It was Griffiths who replied. ‘A big vessel couldn’t approach the pier, there’s only ten feet or so of water, and though they could load the rocket on to Fleck’s after deck he hasn’t anything in the crane line big enough to trans-ship it to a submarine. I’ll bet this coaster has a jumbo derrick, eh, Fleck?’

‘Yes, it has. Submarine? What–?’

‘It can wait.’ I interrupted. ‘Did Henry find the radio?’

‘No.’ Henry himself replied, lugubrious as ever. ‘They’ve blasted down the roof at the other end of the tunnel and sealed it off.’

And tomorrow, I thought, they’ll shove us all inside this end of the tunnel and seal that off. Maybe LeClerc hadn’t been lying when he said he wouldn’t shoot us, starvation wasn’t as quick as shooting but it was just as effective.

‘Well, Fleck.’ I said, ‘how do you like it? You’ve got a daughter in the University of California in Santa Barbara, right next to one of the biggest inter-continental ballistic missile bases in the world, the Vanderberry Air Force Base, a number one target for a hydrogen bomb. The Asiatics sweeping down on your adopted country of Australia. All those dead men–’

‘For God’s sake, shut up!’ he snarled. His fists were tightly clenched and fear and desperation and anger fought in his face. ‘What do you want me to do?’

I told him what I wanted him to do.

The sun touched the rim of the sea, the guards came for us and we were marched away to the blockhouse. As we went in I looked back and saw the floodlight going up outside the hangar. LeClerc and his men would be working all through the night. Let them work. If Fleck came through, there was an even chance the Dark Crusader would never reach its destination.

If Fleck came through.

I awoke in the darkness of the night. I’d been asleep four hours, maybe six, I didn’t know, all I knew was that I didn’t feel any better for it: the heat in that sealed ante-chamber of the blockhouse was oppressive, the air was stuffy and foul and the mattress-making companies had little to fear from the manufacturers of concrete.