Alistair MacLean - The Golden Rendezvous

I stared at the paper until I had memorised its exact position relative to the carpet, picked it up, and smoothed it out. Diagrams of the Ticonderoga with complete stowage plans of the cargo. But all I was interested in was the deck cargo. The plan showed crates stacked on both fore and aft decks, and twenty of those on the foredeck were marked with a heavy red cross. Red for gold.

In a small careful hand Carreras had written on the side: “all deck cargo crates identical in size. Gold in waterproof, with welded steel boxes to float free in event of damage or sinking. Each crate equipped with yellow water stain.” I supposed this was some chemical which, when it came into contact with salt water, would stain the sea for a wide area around. I read on: “gold crates indistinguishable from general cargo. All crates stamped ‘Harms Worth amp; Holden Electrical Engineering Company.’ stated contents generators and turbines. Forward-deck cargo consigned to Nashville, Tennessee, exclusively turbines; afterdeck cargo consigned to Oakridge, Tennessee, exclusively generators. So marked. Forward twenty crates on forward deck gold.”

I didn’t hurry. Time was desperately short, but I didn’t hurry. I studied the plan, which corresponded exactly to Carreras’ observations, and I studied the observations themselves until I knew I would never forget a word of them. I folded and replaced the plan exactly as I had found it, pressed the carpet snap studs back into place, went swiftly through the cabins on a last check to ensure that I had left no trace of my passing: there were none that I could see. I locked the door and left.

The cold, driving rain was falling more heavily than ever now, slanting in across the port side, drumming metallically against the bulkheads, rebounding ankle-high off the polished wooden decks. On the likely enough theory that Carreras’ patrolling men would keep to the sheltered starboard side of the accommodation, I kept to the opposite side as I hurried aft: in my stockinged soles and wearing that black suit and mask no one could have heard or seen me at a distance of more than a few feet. No one heard or saw me; I heard or saw no one. I made no attempt to look, listen, or exercise any caution at all. I reached number four hold within two minutes of leaving Carreras’ cabin.

I needn’t have hurried. Carreras had made no attempt to replace the tarpaulin he’d had to pull back in order to remove the battens, and I could see straight down into the bottom of the hold. Four men down there, two holding powerful electric lanterns, Carreras with a gun hanging by his side, the lanky stooped form of Dr. Slingsby Caroline, still wearing that ridiculous white wig askew on his head, bent over the twister. I couldn’t see what he was doing.

It was like a nineteenth-century print of grave robbers at work. The tomb like depths of the hold, the coffins, the lanterns, the feeling of apprehension and hurry and absorbed concentration that lent an evilly conspiratorial air as the elements were there. And especially the element of tension, an electric tension you could almost feel pulsating through the darkness of the night. But a tension that came not from the fear of discovery but from the possibility that at any second something might go finally and cataclysmically wrong. If it took ten minutes to arm the twister, and obviously it took even longer than that, then it must be a very tricky and complicated procedure altogether. Dr. Caroline’s mind, it was a fair guess, would be in no fit state to cope with tricky and complicated procedures: he’d be nervous, probably badly scared; his hands would be unsteady; he was working, probably with inadequate tools, on an unstable platform by the light of unsteady torches, and even though he might not be desperate enough or fool enough to jinx it deliberately, there seemed to me, as there obviously seemed to the men down in the hold, that there was an excellent chance that his hand would slip. Instinctively I moved back a couple of feet until the opening of the hatch came between me and the scene below. I couldn’t see the twister any more, that made me quite safe if it blew up.

I rose to my feet and made a couple of cautious circuits of the hatch, the first close in, the second further out. But Carreras had no prowlers there: apart from the guards on the gun, the afterdeck appeared to be completely deserted. Returned to the port forward corner of the hatch and settled own to wait.

I hoped I wouldn’t have to wait too long. The sea water had been cold; the heavy rain was cold; the wind was cold; was soaked to the skin and was recurringly and increasingly object to violent bouts of shivering, shivering I could do nothing to control. The fever ran fiercely in my blood. Maybe the thought of Dr. Caroline’s hand slipping had something do with the shivering: whatever the reason, I’d be lucky get off with no more than pneumonia.

Another five minutes, and I took a second cautious peek own into the hold. Still at it. I rose, stretched, and began to pace softly up and down to ward off the stiffness and cramp that was settling down on my body, especially on the legs. Things went the way I hoped I couldn’t afford to have stiffness anywhere.

If things went the way I hoped. I peered down a third time into the hold and this time stayed in that stooped position, unmoving. Dr. Caroline had finished. Under the watchful eye and gun of the radio operator, he was screwing the brass plaqued lid back on the coffin while Carreras and the other man had the lid already off the next coffin and were bent over it, presumably fusing the conventional explosive inside; probably it was intended as a stand-by in case of the malfunction of the twister or, even more probably, in the event of the failure of the twister’s timing mechanism, it was designed to set it off by sympathetic detonation. I didn’t know, I couldn’t guess. And for the moment I was not in the slightest worried. The crucial moment had come. The crucial moment for Dr. Caroline. I knew as he was bound to know — that they couldn’t afford to let him live. He’d done all they required of him. He was of no further use to them. He could die any moment now. If they chose to put a gun to his head and murder him where he stood, there was nothing in the world I could do about it, nothing I would even try to do about it. I would just have to stand there silently, without movement or protest, and watch him die. For if I let Dr. Caroline die without making any move to save him, then only he would die; but if I tried to save him and failed and with only a knife and marlinespike against two submachine guns and pistols the chances of failure were 100 per cent — then not only Caroline but every member of the passengers and crew of the Campari would die also. The greatest good of the greatest number… Would they shoot him where he stood or would they do it on the upper deck?

Logic said they would do it on the upper deck. Carreras would be using the Campari for a few days yet; he wouldn’t be wanting a dead man lying in the hold, and there would be no point in shooting him down there and then carrying him up above when he could make the climb under his own steam and be disposed of on the upper deck. If I were Carreras, that is what I would have figured.

And that was how he did figure. Caroline tightened the last screw, laid down the screw driver, and straightened. I caught a glimpse of his face, white, strained, one eye twitching uncontrollably. The radio operator said, “Senor Carreras?”

Carreras straightened, turned, looked at him, then at Caroline, and nodded. “Take him to his cabin, Carlos. Report here afterwards.” I moved back swiftly as a torch shone vertically upwards from the hold. Carlos was already climbing the ladder. “Report here afterwards.” God, I’d never thought of so obvious a possibility! For a moment I panicked, hands clenched on my pitiful weapons, irresolute, paralysed in thought and action. Without any justification whatsoever I’d had the picture firmly in mind of being able to dispose of Caroline’s appointed executioner without arousing suspicion. Had Carlos, the radio operator, been under instructions to knock off the unsuspecting Caroline on the way forward, then carry on himself to his wireless office, then I might have disposed of him, and hours might have passed before Carreras got suspicious. But now he was in effect saying, “take him up top, shove him over the side, and come back and tell me as soon as you have done so.”