Alistair MacLEAN: The Dark Crusader

The box was about two feet long, by eighteen inches wide and a foot deep, made of oiled yellow pine. On each of the four corners of the lid was the broad arrow property mark of the Royal Navy. At the top a stencil, which was semi-obliterated by a thick black line, said ‘Fleet Air Arm’. Below that were the words ‘Alcohol Compasses’ and beneath that again ‘Redundant. Authorized for disposal’, followed by a stencilled crown, very official looking. I pried the top off with some difficulty and the stencils didn’t lie: six unmarked alcohol compasses, packed in straw and white paper.

‘Looks O.K. to me,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen those stencils before. “Redundant” is a nice naval term for “Obsolete”. Gets a better price from civilian buyers. Maybe Captain Fleck is in the legitimate ex-Government surplus stock disposal trade.’

‘Maybe Captain Fleck had his own private stock of stencils,’ Marie said sceptically. ‘How about the next one?’

I got the next one down. This was stencilled ‘Binoculars’ and binoculars it contained. The third box had again the Fleet Air Arm marking, semi-obliterated, and the stencil ‘Inflatable Lifebelts (Aircraft)’, and again the stencil didn’t lie: bright red lifebelts with CO 2charges and yellow cylinders marked ‘Shark repellant’.

‘We’re wasting our time,’ I said. Having to brace oneself against the heavy rolling of the schooner made the lifting and prying open of the boxes heavy work, the heat of the hold was building up as the sun climbed in the sky and the sweat was pouring down my face and back. ‘Just a common-or-garden second-hand dealer.’

‘Second-hand dealers don’t kidnap people,’ she said tartly. ‘Just one more, please. I have a feeling.’

I checked the impulse to say that it was easy enough to have a feeling when you didn’t have to do the sweating, lugged a fourth and very heavy box off the steadily diminishing pile and lowered it beside the others. The same disposal stencils as before, contents marked ‘Champion Spark Plugs. 2 gross’.

It took me five minutes and a two-inch strip of skin from the back of my right hand to get the lid off. Marie carefully avoided looking at me, maybe she was a mind-reader, maybe she was just getting good and seasick. But she turned as the lid came clear, peered inside then glanced up at me.

‘Maybe Captain Fleck does have his own stencils,’ she murmured.

‘Maybe he does at that,’ I acknowledged. The case was full of drums, but the drums weren’t full of spark plugs: there was enough machine-gun belt ammunition inside the case to start off a fair-sized revolution. ‘This interests me strangely.’

‘Is – is it safe? If Captain Fleck–’

‘What’s Captain Fleck ever done for me? Let him come if he wants to.’ I lugged out a fifth case, sneered at the ‘Spark plug’ stencil, wrenched off the lid with a combination of leverage and a few well-chosen kicks, stared down at the writing on the heavy blue paper wrapped round the contents, then replaced the lid with all the gentle tenderness and reverent care of a Chicago gangster placing a wreath on the grave of his latest victim.

‘Ammonal, 25 per cent aluminium powder!’ Marie, too, had glimpsed the writing. ‘What on earth is that?’

‘A very powerful blasting explosive, just about enough to send the schooner and everybody aboard it into orbit.’ I lifted it gingerly back into position and fresh sweat came to my face when I thought of the élan with which I had hammered it open. ‘Damn tricky stuff, too. Wrong temperature, wrong handling, excessive humidity – well, it makes quite a bang. I don’t like this hold so much any more.’ I caught up the ammunition crate and returned that also: thistledown never felt so light as that box did on top of the ammonal.

‘Are you putting them all back?’ There was a tiny frown between her eyes.

‘What does it look like to you?’

‘Scared?’

‘No. Terrified. The next box might have had nitroglycerine or some such. That really would be something.’ I replaced all the boxes and battens, took the torch and went aft to see what else there was. But there wasn’t much. On the port side, six diesel oil drums, all full, kerosene, D.D.T. and some five-gallon water drums shaped and strapped for carrying over the shoulders – Fleck, I supposed, would need these when he topped up water supplies in the more remote islands where there were no other loading facilities. On the starboard side there were a couple of square metal boxes half-full of assorted and rusted ship’s ironmongery – nuts, bolts, eyebolts, blocks, tackles, bottle screws, even a couple of marline-spikes. I eyed the spikes longingly but left them where they were: it didn’t seem likely that Captain Fleck would have overlooked the possibility, but, even if he had, a marline-spike was a good deal slower than a bullet. And very difficult to conceal.

I walked back to Marie Hopeman. She was very pale.

‘Nothing there at all. Any ideas about what to do now?’

‘You can do what you like,’ she said calmly. ‘I’m going to be sick.’

‘Oh, Lord.’ I ran for the cabin, hammered on the bulkhead and was standing below the hatch when it opened. It was Captain Fleck himself, clear-eyed, rested, freshly-shaved and clad in white ducks. He courteously removed his cheroot before speaking.

‘A splendid morning, Bentall. I trust you–’

‘My wife’s sick,’ I interrupted. ‘She needs fresh air. Can she come up on deck?’

‘Sick?’ His tone changed. ‘Fever?’

‘Seasick.’ I yelled at him.

‘On a day like this?’ Fleck half-straightened and looked around what he probably regarded as an expanse of flat calm. ‘One minute.’

He snapped his fingers, said something I couldn’t catch and waited till the boy who’d brought us breakfast came running up with a pair of binoculars. Fleck made a slow careful 360° sweep of the horizon, then lowered the glasses. ‘She can come up. You, too, if you like.’

I called Marie and let her precede me up the ladder. Fleck gave her a helping hand over the edge of the hatch and said solicitously: I’m sorry to hear that you are not too well, Mrs Bentall. You don’t look too good, and that’s a fact.’

‘You are most kind, Captain Fleck.’ Her tone and look would have shrivelled me, but it bounced right off Fleck. He snapped his fingers again and the boy appeared with a couple of sunshaded deck-chairs. ‘You are welcome to remain as long as you wish, both of you. If you are told to go below you must do so immediately. That is understood?’

I nodded silently.

‘Good. You will not, of course, be so foolish as to try anything foolish. Our friend Rabat is no Annie Oakley, but he could hardly miss at this range.’ I turned my head and saw the little Indian, still in black but without his jacket now, sitting on the other side of the hatch with his sawn-off shotgun across his knees. It was pointed straight at my head and he was looking at me in a longing fashion I didn’t care for. ‘I must leave you now,’ Fleck went on. He smiled, showing his brown crooked teeth. ‘We shipmasters have our business to attend to. I will see you later.’

He left us to fix up the deck-chairs and went for’ard into the wheelhouse beyond the wireless cabin. Marie stretched herself out with a sigh, closed her eyes and in five minutes had the colour back in her cheeks. In ten minutes she had fallen asleep. I should have liked to do the same myself, but Colonel Raine wouldn’t have liked it. ‘External vigilance, my boy’ was his repeated watchword, so I looked round me as vigilantly as I could. But there was nothing much to be vigilant about.

Above, a white-hot sun in a washed-out blue-white sky. To the west, a green-blue sea, to the east, the sunward side, deep green sparkling waters pushed into a long low swell by the warm twenty-knot trade wind. Off to the south-east, some vague and purplish blurs on the horizon that might have been islands or might equally well have been my imagination. And in the whole expanse of sea not a ship or boat in sight. Not even a flying fish. I transferred my vigilance to the schooner.