Alistair MacLEAN: The Dark Crusader

What I do remember was coming to inside the cave, very close to the entrance. I was lying against the wall, and the first thing I saw was another man lying beside me, face down. One of the Chinese. He was dead. I lifted my eyes and saw Griffiths, Brookman, Fleck, Henry and some petty officer I didn’t know, on the other side, pressed close against the wall. At least I thought it was them, it was still dark inside the tunnel. There was room enough for them to shelter. Although the tunnel had been four feet wide and seven high all the way to the end when I’d followed it, the last few feet where Hewell and his men had broken through was no more than three feet high and barely eighteen inches in width. I looked around to see where the others were, but I could see nothing. They would be a hundred yards back in the cavern Hewell had excavated for the temporary storage of the tunnelled out limestone. I looked out again through the tiny opening of the tunnel. The dawn was in the sky.

‘How long have I been lying here?’ I asked suddenly. My voice sounded in my ears like the husky quavering of an old, old man, but maybe it was just the echo inside the cave.

‘About an hour.’ Funny, Griffiths’ voice didn’t sound a bit like an old man’s. ‘Brookman says you’ll be all right. Chipped knee-cap, that’s all. You’ll be walking again in a week.’

‘Did we – did we all get here all right?’

‘Everyone made it.’ Sure, everyone made it. Marie Hopeman didn’t make it. Why should they care? What was all the world to me was only a name to them. Marie Hopeman was down there alone in the armoury and I would never see her again but she was only a name. It didn’t really matter if you were only a name. And I would never see her again, never. Never was a long time. Even in this last thing, this most important thing I’d ever known, I’d failed. I’d failed Marie. And now it was never. Never was going to be always.

‘Bentall!’ Griffiths’ voice was sharp. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m all right.’

‘You’re talking to yourself again.’

‘Am I?’ I reached out and touched the dead man. ‘What happened?’

‘LeClerc sent him in. I don’t know whether he thought we’d retreated to the other end of the cave or whether it was a kind of suicide mission. Chalmers waited till he was all the way in. And then we had two guns.’

‘And what else? An hour is a long time.’

‘They tried firing into the cave after that. But they had to stand in front if they weren’t going to do it blindly. They soon gave it up. Then they tried to blow up the entrance, to seal it off.’

‘They would try that,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t have made much difference, we could have got out. What they meant to do, if things had gone their way, would have been to blow in the tunnel roof for a hundred yards or so. That would really have finished us.’ I wondered vaguely why I was saying this, none of it mattered any more.

‘They set off one charge, above the entrance,’ Griffiths was continuing. ‘Nothing much happened. Then we heard them working just outside, using picks to make holes for more charges. We flung out a couple of fused amatol blocks. I think they lost some men. They didn’t try anything like that again.’

‘The note.’ I said. ‘Didn’t you tell them about the note?’

‘Of course.’ Griffiths said impatiently. I had told Fleck to leave a copy of a faked radio message on the wireless table, saying: ‘Message acknowledged: H.M.S. Kandahar proceeding high speed Suva-Vardu. Expect arrive 8.30 a.m.’ The inference would be that Fleck had sent an SOS by radio. ‘We told LeClerc a naval vessel was coming. He wouldn’t believe us, saying it was impossible, the sentry had been there to prevent messages from being sent, but Fleck said he’d been asleep. Maybe the sentry was one of those killed, I don’t know. We told him he’d find the message on the schooner. He sent someone to fetch it. LeClerc couldn’t afford to ignore it, it might mean he had only three hours left. Less, for Fleck says the captain of the Grasshopper, without him to pilot it in, wouldn’t attempt the gap in the reef before daybreak.’

‘LeClerc would be pleased.’

‘He was mad. He was out there talking to us and we could hear his voice shaking with fury. He kept asking for you but we told him you were unconscious. He said he would shoot Miss Hopeman if you didn’t come out, so I told him you were dying.’

‘That would cheer him up,’ I said drearily.

‘It seemed to,’ Griffiths admitted. ‘Then he went away. Perhaps he took his men with him. We don’t know.’

‘Yes,’ Fleck said heavily. ‘And the first man to stick his head out the entrance gets it blown off.’

Time passed. The light at the mouth of the tunnel steadily brightened through all the stages of dawn, until finally we could see a washed out patch of blue. The sun was up.

‘Griffiths!’ It was LeClerc’s voice from outside and it had us all jumping. ‘Do you hear me?’

‘I hear you.’

‘Is Bentall there?’

Griffiths waved a cautionary hand to silence me, but I ignored it.

‘I’m here. Come in and take me out.’

‘I thought you were dying, Bentall?’ His voice held a vicious overtone, the first time I’d heard anything of the kind from him.

‘What do you want?’

‘I want you, Bentall.’

‘I’m here. Come in and take me out.’

‘Listen, Bentall. Don’t you want to save Miss Hopeman’s life?’

This was it. I should have expected this last desperate move to force my hand. LeClerc wanted me badly, he wanted me very badly indeed.

‘And then you’ve got us both, is that it, LeClerc?’ I’d no doubt that was it.

‘I give you my word. I’ll send her in.’

‘Don’t listen.’ Captain Griffiths warned me in an urgent whisper. ‘Once he’s got you, he’ll use you as bait to get someone like me out, and so on. Or he’ll just kill you both.’

I knew which it would be. He’d just kill us both. He wasn’t interested in the others, but he had to kill us both. Me, at any rate. But it was a chance I had to take. Maybe he wouldn’t dispose of us straight away, he might take us aboard the ship with him. It was one last chance – it wasn’t a chance in a million, but it was a chance. That was all I asked. A chance. I might yet save us both, and as the thought came I knew I never could. It wasn’t even that million to one chance, but it was like what Marie had said, sitting in the electric chair and the man pulling the switch and still hoping. I said: ‘All right, LeClerc, I’m coming out.’

I hadn’t seen the signal. Fleck, Henry and Griffiths reached me in the same instant, pinning me to the ground. For a few seconds I struggled like a madman, but I hadn’t the strength left to struggle any longer.

‘Let me go.’ I whispered. ‘For God’s sake, let me go.’

‘We’re not letting you go.’ Griffiths said. He raised his voice. ‘All right, LeClerc, you can leave. We’ve got Bentall and we’re keeping him. You know why.’

‘Then I shall have to kill Miss Hopeman,’ LeClerc said savagely. ‘I’m going to kill her, do you hear, Bentall? I’m going to kill her. But not today, not for some time yet. Or perhaps she’ll kill herself first. Goodbye, Bentall. Thank you for the Dark Crusader.’

We heard the sound of departing footsteps and then there was only the silence… The three men took their hands away and Fleck said: ‘I’m sorry, boy, I’m more sorry than I can say.’

I didn’t answer. I just sat there, wondering why the world didn’t come to an end. By and by I heaved myself painfully on to my hands and one knee and said: ‘I’m going out.’

‘Don’t be so damn stupid.’ I could see by the expression on Griffiths’ face that he was regaining his first impression of me, one that had been far from favourable. ‘They’ll be waiting.’