Alistair MacLean - The Golden Rendezvous

I wasted no time but went hand over hand down the life line as fast as Macdonald paid out the rope about my waist. I was still swallowing some water but not enough to matter. After about fifteen seconds I took my left hand off the life line and started scraping it along the side of the ship, feeling for the rope I’d left dangling over the side of the afterdeck last night. The life line was now sliding through my right hand and, wet though it was, it was burning the skin of my palm. But I hardly noticed it. I had to find that Manilla I’d left tied to the guardrail stanchion; if I didn’t, then it was curtains. Not only would the hopes of my carrying out my plan be at an end; it would be the end for me also. Macdonald and I had had to act on the assumption that the rope would be there and no attempt would be made to pull me back until he got the clear prearranged signal that it was time to begin just that.

And to make any such clear signal while in the water, I had discovered, was impossible. If the Manilla wasn’t there I’d just be towed along at the end of that nylon rope until I was drowned. Nor would that take long. The salt water I’d swallowed, the violent buffeting of the waves, the blows I’d suffered from being flung a score of times against the iron walls of the Campari, the loss of blood and my injured leg — all those had taken their frightening toll and I was dangerously weak. It would not be long.

My left hand brushed against the Manilla: I grabbed it, a drowning man seizing the last straw in the wide, endless expanse of the ocean.

Tucking the life line through the rope round my waist, I over armed myself up the Manilla till I was all but clear of the water, wrapped my one good leg round the rope and hung there, gasping like an exhausted dog, shivering and then being violently sick as I brought up all the sea water that had collected in my stomach. After that I felt better but weaker than ever. I started to climb.

I hadn’t far to go, twenty feet and I’d be there, but I hadn’t gone two feet before I was bitterly regretting the fact that I hadn’t followed my impulse of the previous night and knotted the Manilla. The Manilla was soaking wet and slippery and I had to clasp tight with all the strength of my hands to get any purchase at all. And there was little enough strength left in my hands, my aching forearm muscles were exhausted from clinging so long and so desperately to the life line, my shoulders were just as far gone; even when I could get a good purchase, even when my weakening hands didn’t slide down the rope when I put all my weight on them, I could till pull myself up only two or three inches at a time. Three inches, no more: that was all I could manage at one time.

I couldn’t make it; reasons, instinct, logic, common sense ill told me that I couldn’t make it, but I made it. The last two feet of the climb was something out of a dark nightmare, hauling myself up two inches, slipping back an inch, hauling myself up again and always creeping nearer the top. Three feet from the top I stopped: I knew I was only that distance way from safety, but to climb another inch on that rope was something I knew I could never do. Arms shaking from the strain, shoulders on fire with agony, I hauled my body up until my eyes were level with knotted hands: even in that almost pitchy darkness I could see the faint white blur of my gleaming knuckles. For a second I hung there, then flung my right hand desperately upwards. If I missed the coaming of the scuppers… But I couldn’t miss it. I had no more strength in me, I could never make such an effort again.

I didn’t miss it. The top joint of my middle finger hooked over the coaming and locked there, then my other hand was beside it, I was scrabbling desperately for the lowermost bar in the guardrails; I had to get it over, and over at once, or I’d fall back into the sea. I found the bar, had both hands on it, swung my body convulsively to the right till my sound foot caught the coaming, reached up to the next bar, reached the teak rail, half dragged, half slid my body over the top, and fell heavily on the deck on the other side.

How long I lay there, trembling violently in every weary muscle in my body, whooping hoarsely for the breath my tortured lungs were craving, gritting my teeth against the fire in my shoulders and arms, and trying not to let the red mist before my eyes envelop me completely, I do not know. It may have been two minutes, it may have been ten. Somewhere during that time I was violently ill again. And then slowly, ever so slowly, the pain eased a little, my breathing slowed, and the mists before my eyes cleared away, but I still couldn’t stop trembling. It was well for me that no five-year-old happened along the deck that night: he could have had me over the side without taking his hands out of his pockets.

I untied the ropes from my waist with numbed and fumbling and all but useless hands, tied them both to the stanchion just above the Manilla, pulled the life line till it was almost taut, then gave three sharp, deliberate tugs. A couple of minutes passed, then came three clearly defined answering tugs. They knew now I had made it. I hoped they felt better about it than I did. Not that that would be hard.

I sat there for at least another five minutes till some measure of strength came back to me, rose shakily to my feet, and padded across the deck to number four hold. The tarpaulin on the starboard forward corner was still secured. That meant there was no one down below. But I really hadn’t expected them to be there yet.

I straightened, looked all round me, then stood very still, the driving rain streaming down my sodden mask and soaking clothes. Not fifteen yards away from me, right aft, I had seen a red glow come and vanish in the darkness. Ten seconds passed, then the glow again. I’d heard of waterproof cigarettes, but not all that waterproof. But someone was smoking a cigarette, no question about that.

Like falling thistledown, only quieter, I drifted down in the direction of the glow. I was still trembling, but you can’t hear trembling. Twice I stopped to line up direction and distance by that glowing cigarette and finally stopped less than ten feet away from it.

My mind was hardly working at all or I’d never have dared to do it: a careless flick of a torch beam, say, and it would have been all over.

But no one flicked a torch. The red glow came again and I could now just make out that the smoker wasn’t standing in the rain. He was in the V-shaped entrance of a tarpaulin, a big tarpaulin draped over some big object. The gun, of course, the gun that Carreras had mounted on the afterdeck, with the tarpaulin serving the dual purpose of protecting the mechanism from the rain and concealing it from any other vessel they might have passed during the day.

I heard the murmur of voices. Not the smoker, but another two crouched somewhere inside the shelter of the tarpaulin.

That meant three people there. Three people guarding the gun. Carreras was certainly taking no chances with that gun. But why so many as three? You didn’t need three. Then I had it. Carreras hadn’t just been talking idly when he’d spoken of the possibility of foul play in connection with the death of his son. He did suspect it, but his cold, logical mind had told him that neither crew nor passengers of the Campari could have been responsible. If his son had met death by violence, then death could only have come from one of his own men. The renegade who had killed his son might strike again, might attempt to ruin his plans. And so three men on guard together. They could watch each other.

I left, skirted the hatch, and made my way to the bo’sun’s store. I fumbled round in the darkness, found what I wanted, a heavy marlinespike, and then was on my way, marlinespike in one hand, Macdonald’s knife in the other.