Jack Higgins - A Fine Night for Dying

Hamid smiled wanly, but seemed unable to speak. Chavasse got the bottle of rum out of his pocket and pulled the cork out with his teeth. “Drink some of this.”

He forced the old man’s mouth open and poured. Hamid coughed, half-choked and pulled his head away. “It is against my religion,” he said with a gasp.

Chavasse grinned. “Allah will forgive you this once, old man,” he said in Urdu, and swallowed the rest of the rum.

Strangely enough, the old man’s only reaction to being addressed in his own language was to reply in the same tongue. “If I live, it is because Allah wills it. If I am to die-so be it.”

Another half-hour and Chavasse was really beginning to feel the cold. He had taken off the belt of his raincoat and had used it to secure himself to Hamid, who floated beside him. There was no sign of Darcy Preston or Mrs. Campbell-hadn’t been for some time now.

Old Hamid was still, eyes closed, his face a death mask, blue with cold. Chavasse slapped him a couple of times and the eyes opened to stare blankly. A kind of recognition dawned. The lips moved, the words were only a whisper.

“Ali-Ali, is it you, my son?” he asked in Urdu.

“Yes, my father.” It took everything Chavasse had to make the correct reply. “Not long now. Soon we will be home.”

The old man smiled, his eyes closed, and suddenly a wave took them high into a sky of lead, holding them above the water long enough for Chavasse to see cliffs through driving rain no more than a couple of hundred yards away. Between them and the land lay wave after wave and white water crashing in to meet the distant shore.

From that moment, they moved fast, helpless in the grip of the current that carried them before it. Chavasse gripped the old man tightly as water broke over them, and then another great wall of water, green as bottle glass, smashed down on them.

Chavasse went deep, too deep, and found himself alone, fighting for life like a hooked fish. His life belt was gone, Old Hamid was gone, but strangely, no panic touched him. If he was to die, he would die fighting.

There is a behavior pattern common to all animals and known to psychologists as the critical reaction , a phrase that describes the fury with which any living creature will fight for survival when there is no other way, either backed into a corner by his enemies or alone in a sea of white water, as Paul Chavasse was now.

He broke surface, sucked air into his lungs and went under again, tearing at the buttons of his trench coat. He got it off, and then the jacket, and came up for more air. The shoes took a little longer, probably because his feet were swollen from their long immersion in cold salt water, but suddenly he was free of those, too, and swimming again, his rage to live giving him strength drawn from that hidden reserve that lies dormant in every man.

And then his foot kicked sand and he went under again. A wave took him forward across a great rounded boulder streaming with water and he found himself knee-deep in seaweed.

Another wave bowled him over. His fingers hooked across a rib of rock, and he held on as the waters washed over him. As they receded, he staggered to his feet and stumbled across the rocks to the safety of a strip of white sand at the base of the cliffs.

He lay on his face, gasping for air, then forced himself to his feet. Hamid-he had to find Hamid. The sea was in his mouth, his ears, his throat; it seemed to sing inside his head as he turned and picked his way through the rocks to the main beach.

He saw Hamid at once, thirty or forty yards away, lying in the shallows, the water breaking over him. Chavasse started to run, calling out in Urdu, “I’m coming. Hold on! Hold on!”

Stupid, really. The old man would be dead, he knew that. He dragged the body clear of the water, turned it over and, greatest of all miracles, the old eyes opened.

Hamid smiled, all fatigue and pain washed from his face. “Ali, my son, I knew you would come,” he whispered. “Bless me now.”

“You are blessed, old man, hold my hand,” Chavasse said in Urdu. “Blessed and thrice blessed. Go with Allah.”

The old man smiled contentedly, his eyes closed, and the life went out of him.

Chavasse crouched there beside him for quite a while, unaware of the cold, staring blindly into space. When he finally stood up, Darcy Preston was waiting a few yards away, watching him gravely.

Like Chavasse, he was down to shirt and pants and his life jacket was gone. There was a cut on his face, another on his left arm.

“What about Mrs. Campbell?” Chavasse asked.

Preston shrugged. “I tried to catch her when that big wave split us all up, but the current was too strong for me. She was still floating when I last saw her. She could still make it.”

Not that he believed that-neither of them did, and Chavasse said wearily, “Okay, let’s get out of here.”

“Aren’t we going to move him?”

“Let’s put it like this,” Chavasse said. “The way things are at the moment, it would make a lot more sense if you and I didn’t hang around to be found with him. If we take him higher up the beach, they’ll know someone put him there.”

“But what in the hell are we going to do?” Preston demanded.

Chavasse looked at his watch. “It’s a quarter to five. We find the road and the nearest phone box. I put through a call to my people, then we get behind the nearest hedge and wait. You’ll be on the way to London in an hour.”

Darcy Preston shook his head. “Well, one thing’s certain. Whatever else you are, you can’t be the police.”

“Full marks,” Chavasse said. “Now let’s get out of here,” and he turned and moved toward the cliffs through the gray morning.

London

“Montefiore-Enrico Montefiore.” Mallory turned from the window, filling his pipe from an elegant leather pouch. “One of the richest men in Europe, though very few people have ever heard of him. Dosen’t like having his picture taken, but you’ll find one or two in his file. He’s the kind of big financier who’s almost gone out of style. A shadowy figure somewhere in the background, with his finger in so many pies you lose count.”

“And Hellgate?” Chavasse asked. “What about that?”

Mallory shook his head. “Doesn’t mean a thing. As I recall, Montefiore has a place on Lake Lucerne and a palazzo in Venice. Actually, he’s rather dropped out of sight during the past three or four years.” He shook his head. “This doesn’t make any kind of sense at all. Why on earth would a man of Montefiore’s background be mixed up in a thing like this?”

There was a knock at the door and Jean Frazer came in. She handed Mallory an envelope. “More material from S2, sir, courtesy of the C.I.A. China Section.”

She went out and Mallory opened the envelope and took out several record cards, each with a photo pinned to it. “Better look at these, Paul. See if anyone strikes a chord.”

Cheung was number five, only his name was Ho Tsen and he was a colonel in the Army of the People’s Republic of China. It was an excellent likeness and Chavasse passed it across.

“That’s our boy.”

Mallory checked through the card and nodded, a slight frown on his face. “Quite a character. One of their best men, from the looks of this. Rather stupid to pass him off as a military attache in Paris for three years. The C.I.A. was bound to catch on to him.”

The telephone buzzed, and he picked it up and listened for just over a minute. When he replaced the receiver, he looked thoughtful.

“That was Travers calling in from this place, Fixby. It’s a little village on a creek near Weymouth. There’s a broken-down boatyard just outside it, run by a man named Gorman. He’s missing at the moment. Last seen moving out to sea at about six this morning in a thirty-foot launch he uses to take people big-game fishing.”