Alistair MacLean - The Golden Rendezvous

I wasn’t feeling any pain at all, but I remembered about the pile driver that had hurled me back against the bar. I looked down at my left leg, and from mid-thigh to well below the knee the trousers were so saturated with blood that there was no trace of white left. The carpet all round my leg was soaked with it. That carpet, I remembered vaguely, had cost over $10,000, and it was certainly taking a terrible beating that night. Lord Dexter would have been furious. I looked at my leg again and fingered the soggy material. Three distinct tears, which meant that I had been shot three times. I supposed the pain would come later. A great deal of blood, far too much blood: I wondered if an artery had been torn.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” It was Carreras speaking, and although his hand must have been giving him hell there was no sign of it in his face. The fury, the malevolence I had so recently seen, was only a memory: he was back on balance again, urbane, commanding, in complete control of the situation. “I regret all this, regret it extremely.” He waved his left hand in the direction of Bullen and Wilson, Macdonald and myself. “All so unnecessary, so terribly unnecessary, brought upon Captain Bullen and his men by Captain Bullen’s reckless folly.” Most of the passengers were on their feet now, and I could see Susan Beresford standing beside her father, staring down at me as if she weren’t seeing too well, eyes abnormally large in the pale face. “I regret, too, the distress you have been caused, and to you, Mr. and Mrs. Beresford, I tend my apologies for the ruin of your night’s entertainment. Your kindness has been ill-rewarded.”

“For god’s sake cut out the fancy speeches,” I interrupted. My voice didn’t sound like mine at all, a harsh, strained croak, a bullfrog with laryngitis. “Get the doctor for Captain Bullen. He’s been shot through the lung.”

He looked at me speculatively, then at Bullen, then back at me. “A certain indestructible quality about you, Mr. Carter,” he said thoughtfully. He bent over and peered at my blood stained leg. “Shot three times, your leg must be pretty badly smashed, yet you can observe so tiny a detail as a fleck of blood on Captain Bullen’s mouth. You are incapacitated, and I am glad. Had your captain, officers, and crew been composed exclusively of men like yourself, I would never have come within a thousand miles of the Campari. As for the doctor, he will be here soon. He is tending a man on the bridge.”

“Jamieson? Our Third Officer?”

“Mr. Jamieson is beyond all help,” he said curtly. “Like captain Bullen, he fancied himself as a man cast in a heroic mould; like captain Bullen, he has paid the price for his stupidity. The man at the wheel was struck in the arm by a stray bullet.” he turned to face the passengers. “You need have no further worry about your personal safety. The Campari is now completely in my hands and will remain so. However, you form no part of my plans and will be transferred in two or three days to another vessel. Meanwhile you will all eat, live, and sleep in this room: I cannot spare individual guards for each stateroom. Mattresses and blankets will be brought to you. If you co-operate, you can exist in reasonable comforts; you certainly have no more to fear.”

“What is the meaning of this damnable outrage, Carreras?” There was a shake in Beresford’s voice. “Those desperadoes, those killers, what of them? Who are they? Where in the name of God did they come from? What do you intend to do? You’re mad, man, completely mad. Surely you know you can’t expect to get off with this?” “You may use that thought for consolation. Ah, doctor, there you are.” He held out his right hand, swathed in its bloodstained handkerchief. “Have a look at this, will you?”

“Damn you and your hand,” Dr. Marston said bitterly. The old boy was trembling; the sight of the dead and dying must have hit him hard, but he was hopping mad for all that. “There are other more seriously injured men here. I must…”

“You may as well realise that I, and I alone, give the orders from now on,” Carreras interrupted. “My hand. At once. Ah, Juan.” This to a tall, thin, swarthy man who had just entered, a rolled-up chart under his arm. “Give that to Mr. Carter here. That’s him, yes. Mr. Carter, Captain Bullen said — and I have been aware of it for many hours — that we are heading for Nassau and are due there in less than four hours. Lay off a course to take us well clear of Nassau, to the east, then out midway between the Great Abaco and Eleuthera islands and so approximately north-northwest into the north Atlantic. My own navigation has become rather rusty, I fear. Mark in the approximate times for course changes.”

I took the chart, pencil, parallel rulers, and dividers, and laid the chart on my knee. Carreras said consideringly, “What, no ‘do your own damned navigation’ or words to that effect?”

“What’s the point?” I said wearily. “You wouldn’t hesitate to line up all the passengers and shoot them one by one if I didn’t co-operate.”

“It’s a pleasure to deal with a man who sees and accepts the inevitable.” Carreras smiled. “But you greatly overestimate my ruthlessness. Later, Mr. Carter, when we have you fixed up you shall become a permanent installation on the bridge. It is unfortunate, but I suppose you realise that you are the only deck officer left to us?”

“You’ll have to get some other installation on the bridge,” I said bitterly. “My thighbone is smashed.”

“What?” he looked at me narrowly.

“I can feel it grating.” I twisted my face up to let him see how I could feel it grating. Dr. Marston will soon confirm it.”

“We can arrive at some other arrangement,” Carreras said equably. He winced as Dr. Marston probed at his hand. “The forefinger it will have to come off?”

“I don’t think so. A local anaesthetic, a small operation, and I believe I can save it.” Carreras didn’t know the danger he was in; if he let old Marston get to work on him he’d probably end up by losing his whole arm. “But it will have to be done in my surgery.”

“It’s probably time we all west to the surgery. Tony, check engine room, radar room, all men off duty; see that they are all safely under guard. Then take that chart to the bridge and see that the helmsman makes the proper course alterations at the proper time. See that the radar operator is kept under constant supervision and reports the slightest object on his screen: Mr. Carter here is quite capable of laying off a course which would take us smack into the middle of Eleuthera Island. Two men to take Mr Cerdan to his cabin. Dr. Marston, is it possible to take those men down to your surgery without endangering their lives?” The good Samaritan, all overcome with concern for his fellow men.

“I don’t know.” Marston finished his temporary bandaging of Carreras’ hand and crossed to Bullen. “How do you feel, captain?”

Bullen looked at him with lack-lustre eyes. He tried to smile but it was no more than an agonised grimace. He tried to speak but no words came, just fresh bubbles of blood at his lips. Marston produced scissors, cut the captain’s shirt open, examined him briefly, and said, “We may as well risk it. Two of your men, Mr. Carreras, two strong men. See that his chest is not compressed.”

He left Bullen, bent over Macdonald, and straightened almost immediately. “This man can be moved with safety.”

“Macdonald!” I said. “The bo’sun. He — he’s not dead?”

“He’s been hit on the head. Creased, probably concussed, perhaps even the skull fractured, but he’ll survive. He seems to have been hit on the knee, to-nothing serious.” I felt as if someone had lifted the Sydney Bridge off my back. The bo’sun had been my friend, my good friend, for too many years now, and, besides, with Archie Macdonald by me all things were possible. “And Mr. Carter?” Carreras queried.