Alistair MacLean - The Golden Rendezvous

I went down the hatch slowly, awkwardly, painfully — Marston had a higher opinion of his anaesthetics than I had and joined Susan on the floor behind the baffle. At this level the noise was redoubled, the sight of those head-high behemoths of crates charging across the hold more terrifying than ever. Susan said, “the coffins, where are they?”

All I had told her was that I wanted to examine some coffins. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what we might find in them.

“They’re boxed. In wooden crates. On the other side of the hold.”

“The other side!” She twisted her head, lined up the lantern, and looked at the sliding wreckage and crates screeching and tearing their way across the floor. “The other side! We would — we would be killed before we got halfway there.”

“Like enough, but I don’t see anything else for it. Hold on a minute, will you?”

“You! with your leg! You can’t even hobble. Oh no!”

Before I could stop her, she was over the baffle and half running, half staggering across the hold, tripping and stumbling as the ship lurched and her feet caught on broken planks of wood, but always managing to regain balance, to stop suddenly or dodge nimbly as a crate slid her way. She was agile, I had to admit, and quick on her feet, but she was exhausted with seasickness, with bracing herself for the past hours against the constant violent lurching of the Campari; she’d never make it.

But make it she did, and I could see her on the other side, flashing her torch round. My admiration for her spirit was equailed only by my exasperation at her actions. What was she going to do with those boxed coffins when she found them, carry them back across the floor, one under each arm?

But they weren’t there, for after she had looked everywhere she shook her head. And then she was coming back and I was shouting out a warning, but the warning stuck in my throat and was only a whisper and she wouldn’t have heard it anyway. A plunging, careening crate, propelled by a sudden vicious lurch as the Campari plunged headlong into an exceptional trough, caught her back and shoulder and pitched her to the floor, pushing her along before its massive weight as if it were imbued with an almost human inhumanuality of evil and malignance and determined to crush the life out of her against the forward bulkhead. And then, in the last second before she would have died, the Campari straightened, the crate screeched to a halt less than a yard from the bulkhead, and Susan was lying there between crate and bulkhead, very still. I must have been at least fifteen feet away from her, but I have no recollection of covering the distance from the baffle to where she lay and then back again, but I must have done; for suddenly we were there in a place of safety and she was clinging to me as if I were the last hope left in the world.

“Susan!” My voice was hoarse, a voice belonging to someone else altogether. “Susan, are you hurt?”

She clung even closer. By some miracle she still held the lantern clutched in her right hand. It was round the back of my neck somewhere, but the reflected beam from the ship’s side gave enough light to see by. Her mask had been torn ff; her face was scratched and bleeding, her hair a bedragled mess, her clothes soaked and her heart going like a captive bird’s. For an incongruous moment an unbidden recollection touched my mind, a recollection of a very cool, very poised, sweetly malicious, pseudo-solicitous young lady asking me about cocktails only two days ago in Carracio, but the vision faded as soon as it had come; the incongruity was too much.

“Susan!” I said urgently. “Are you “I’m not hurt.” She gave a long, tremulous sigh that was ore shudder than sigh. “I was just too scared to move.” he eased her grip a trifle, looked at me with green eyes enormous in the pallor of her face, then buried her face my shoulder. I thought she was going to choke me. It didn’t last long, fortunately. I felt the grip slowly easing, w the beam of the lantern shifting, and she was saying in n abnormally matter-of-fact voice: “there they are.” I turned round and there, not ten feet away, they were deed. Three coffins — Carreras had already removed the cases — and securely stowed between baffle and bulkhead and added with tarpaulins, so that they could come to no harm.

Tony Carreras kept on repeating, his old man didn’t miss much. Dark, shiny coffins with black-braided ropes and brass handles. One of them had an inlet plaque on the lid, copper or brass, I couldn’t be sure.

“That saves me some trouble.” My voice was almost back normal. I took the hammer and chisel I’d borrowed from the bo’sun’s store and let them drop. “This screw driver will all I need. We’ll find two of those with what’s normally side them. Give me the lantern and stay there. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“You’ll be quicker if I hold the lantern.” Her voice matched my own in steadiness, but the pulse in her throat was going like a trip hammer. “Hurry, please.”

I was in no way to argue. I caught the foot of the nearest coffin and pulled it towards me so that I could have room to work. It was jammed. I slid my hand under the end to lift it and suddenly my finger found a hole in the bottom of the coffin. And then another. And a third. A lead-lined coffin with holes bored in the bottom of it. That was curious, to say the least.

When I’d moved it far enough out, I started on the screws. They were brass and very heavy, but so was the screw driver I’d taken from Macdonald’s store. And at the back of my mind was the thought that if the knockout drops Dr. Marston had provided for the sentry were in any way as ineffective as the anaesthetic he had given me, then the sentry would be waking up any minute now. If he hadn’t already come to. I had that coffin lid off in no time at all.

Beneath the lid was not the satin shroud or silks I would have expected but a filthy old blanket. In the Generalissimo’s country, perhaps, their customs with coffins were different from ours. I pulled off the blanket and found I was right. Their customs were, on occasion, different. The corpse, in this case, consisted of blocks of amatol. All block was clearly marked with the word, so there was no mistake about it — a primer, a small case of detonators, and a compact square box with wires leading from it, a timing device probably.

Susan was peering over my shoulder. “What’s amatol?”

“High explosive. Enough there to blow the Campari apart.” She asked nothing else. I replaced the blanket, screwed on the lid, and started on the next coffin. This, too, had holes in the underside, probably to prevent the explosives sweating. I removed the lid, looked at the contents, and replaced the lid. Number two was a duplicate of number one. And then I started on the third one. The one with the plaque. This would be the one. The plaque was heart-shaped and read with impressive simplicity: “Richard Hoskins, senator.” just that.

Senator of what I didn’t know. But impressive. Impressive enough to ensure its reverent transportation to the United States. I removed the lid with care, gentleness, and as much respectful reverence as if Richard Hoskins actually were inside, which I knew he wasn’t.

Whatever lay inside was covered with a rug. I lifted the rug gingerly; Susan brought the lantern nearer, and there it lay, cushioned in blankets and cotton wool. A polished cylinder, seventy-five inches in length, eleven inches in diameter, with a whitish pyroceram nose cap. Just lying there, there was something frightening about it, something unutterably evil; but perhaps that was just because of what was in my own mind.

“What is it?” Susan’s voice was so low that she bad to come closer to repeat the words. “Oh, Johnny, what in the world is it?”