Alistair MacLean - Fear is the Key

I kept on climbing and reached the top. Had it been a solid platform there I don't think I would have managed to pull myself on to it against that wind, my one good hand would just have scrabbled about on the smooth metal surface until exhaustion overtook me and I fell back off the ladder: tout as it was I managed to hook my fingers in the openwork steel grille and drag myself on to the platform.

Larry was close behind. He gestured with his torch and I got his meaning. I moved to one side, past the little cabin at the corner where a lamp on a recessed shelf threw a faint light that was cut off abruptly at waist level, and waited.

Slowly, carefully, his eyes never leaving my face, Larry came over the top and straightened to his feet. I moved farther along the monkey-board, slowly, backwards, with my face to Larry. On my right I could dimly make out the big pipe storage racks, on my left the edge of the monkey board, no handrail, just a sheer drop of a hundred feet.

Then I stopped. The gallery of the monkey-board seemed to run all the way round the outside of the derrick and it would have suited Larry just fine to have me out on the northern edge where, wind or no wind, a good shove — or a .45 slug — might have sent me tumbling direct into the sea a hundred and fifty feet below.

Larry came close to me. He'd switched off his torch now. The fixed light on the cabin side might leave the lowermost three feet in darkness, but it was enough for him and he wouldn't want to take even the remote chance of anyone spotting a flickering torchlight and wondering what any crazy person should be doing up on the monkey-board in that hurricane wind and with all the work stopped.

He halted three feet away. He was panting heavily and he had his wolf grin on again.

"Keep going, Talbot," he shouted.

I shook my head. "This is as far as I'm going." I hadn't really heard him, the response was purely automatic, I had just seen something that made me feel ice-cold, colder by far than the biting lash of that rain. I had thought, down in the radio shack, that Mary Ruthven had been playing possum, and now I knew I had been right. She had been conscious, she must have taken off after us immediately we had left. There was no mistaking at all that gleaming dark-blonde head, those heavily plaited braids that appeared over the top of the ladder and moved up into the night.

You fool, I thought savagely, you crazy, crazy little fool. I had no thought for the courage it must have taken to make that climb, for the exhausting nightmare it must have been, even for the hope it held out for myself. I could feel nothing but bitterness and resentment and despair and behind all of those the dim and steadily growing conviction that I'd count the world well lost for Mary Ruthven.

"Get going," Larry shouted again.

"So you can shove me into the sea? No."

"Turn round."

"So you can sap me with that gun and they find me lying on the deck beneath, no suspicion of foul play." She was only two yards away now. "Won't do, Larry boy. Shine your torch on my shoulder. My left shoulder."

The flash clicked on and I heard again that maniac giggle.

"So I did get you, hey, Talbot?"

"You got me." She was right behind him now, that great wind had swept away any incautious sound she might have made. I had been watching her out of the corner of my eye, but now I suddenly looked straight at her over Larry's shoulder, my eyes widening in hope.

"Try again, copper," Larry giggled. "Can't catch me twice that way."

Throw your arms round his neck or his legs, I prayed. Or throw your coat over his head. But don't, don't, don't go for his gun-hand.

She went for his gun-hand. She reached round his right side and I plainly heard the smack as her right hand closed over his right wrist.

For a moment Larry stood stock-still. Had he jumped or twisted or moved, I would have been on to him like an express train, but he didn't, the very unexpectedness of the shock temporarily petrified him. It petrified his gun hand too — it was still pointing straight at me.

And it was still levelled at my heart when he made a violent grab for Mary's right wrist with his left hand. A jerk up with his left hand, a jerk down with his right and his gun-hand was free. Then he moved a little to his left, jerked her forward a foot, pinned her against the storage racks to the right and started to twist her wrist away from him. He knew who he had now and the wolf grin was back on his face and those coal-black eyes and the gun were levelled on me all the time.

For five, maybe ten seconds, they stood there straining. Fear and desperation gave the girl strength she would never normally have had, but Larry too was desperate and he could bring far more leverage to bear. There was a half-stifled sob of pain and despair and she was on her knees before him, then on her side, Larry still holding her wrist. I couldn't see her now, only the faint sheen of her hair, she was below the level of the faint light cast by the lamp. All I could see was the madness in the face of the man opposite me, and the light shining from the shelf of the little cabin a few feet behind him. I lifted the heel of my right shoe off the ground and started to work my foot out of it with the help of my left foot. It wasn't even a chance.

"Come here, cop," Larry said stonily. "Come here or I'll give the girl friend's wrist just another little turn and then you can wave her goodbye." He meant it, it would make no difference now, he knew he would have to kill her anyway. She knew too much.

I moved two steps closer. My heel was out of the right shoe. He thrust the barrel of the Colt hard against my mouth, I felt a tooth break and the salt taste of blood from a gashed upper lip, on the inside. I twisted my face away, spat blood and he thrust the revolver deep into my throat.

"Scared, cop?" he said softly. His voice was no more than a whisper, but I heard it above the voice of that great wind, maybe it was true enough, this business of the abnormally heightened sensitivity of those about to die. And I was about to die.

I was scared all right, I was scared right to the depths as I had never been scared before. My shoulder was beginning to hurt, and hurt badly, and I wanted to be sick, that damned revolver grinding into my throat was sending waves of nausea flooding through me. I drew my right foot back as far as I could without upsetting my balance. My right toe was hooked over the tongue of the shoe.

"You can't do it, Larry," I croaked. The pressure on my larynx was agonising, the gun-sight jabbing cruelly into the underside of my chin. "Kill me and they'll never get the treasure."

"I'm laughing." He was, too, a horrible maniacal cackle. "See me, cop, I'm laughing. I'd never see any of it anyway. Larry the junky never does. The white stuff, that's all my old man ever gives his ever-loving son."

"Vyland?" I'd known for hours.

"My father. God damn his soul." The gun shifted, pointed at my lower stomach. "So long, cop."

My right foot was already swinging forward, smoothly, accelerating, but unseen to Larry in the darkness.

"I'll tell him goodbye from you," I said. The shoe clattered against the corrugated iron of the little hut even as I spoke.

Larry jerked his head to look over his right shoulder to locate the source of this fresh menace. For a split second of time, before he started to swing round again, the back of his left jawbone was exposed to me just as that of the radio operator had been only a few minutes before.

I hit him. I hit him as if he were a satellite and I was going to send him into orbit round the moon. I hit him as if the lives of every last man, woman and child in the world depended on it. I hit him as I had never hit anyone in my life before, as I knew even as I did it that I could never hit anyone again.