Alistair MacLean - When Eight Bells Toll

Charlotte Skouras was on my right in the darkened wheel-house. She'd been there only three minutes, having spent all our time alongside in her darkened cabin with the door closed. Uncle Arthur was on my left, desecrating the clean night air with one of his cheroots. I reached up for a clipped torch and patted my right hand pocket to see if the Lilliput was still there. It was.

I said to Charlotte Skouras: "Open the wheelhouse door. Put it back on the catch and stand clear." Then I said to Uncle Arthur: "Take the wheel, sir. Hard a-port when I call. Then back north on course again."

He took the wheel without a word. I heard the starboard wheelhouse door click on its latch. We were doing no more than three knots through the water. The dinghy was twenty-five yards away, the men in the bows and stern holding up arms to shield their eyes from our searchlight. Quinn had stopped rowing. On our present course we'd leave them at least ten feet on our port beam. I kept the searchlight steady on the boat.

Twenty yards separated us and I could see Jacques lining up his machine-pistol on our light when I thrust the throttle lever right open. The note of the big diesel exhaust deepened and the Firecrest began to surge forward.

"Hard over now," I said.

Uncle Arthur spun the wheel. The sudden thrust of our single port screw boiled back against the port-angled rudder, pushing the stem sharply starboard. Flame lanced from Jacques machine-pistol, a silent flame, he'd a silencer on. Bullets ricocheted off our aluminium foremast but missed both light and wheelhouse. Quinn saw what was coming and dug his oars deep but he was too late. I shouted "Midships, now," pulled the throttle lever back to neutral and jumped out through the starboard doorway on to the deck.

We hit them just where Jacques was sitting, breaking off the dinghy's bows, capsizing it and throwing the three men into the water. The overturned remains of the boat and a couple of struggling figures came slowly down the starboard side of the Firecrest. My torch picked up the man closer in to our side. Jacques, with the machine-pistol held high above his head, instinctively trying to keep it dry though it must have been soaked when he had been catapulted into the water. I held gun-hand and torch-hand together, aiming down the bright narrow beam. I squeezed the Lilliput's trigger twice and a bright crimson flower bloomed where his face had been. He went down as if a shark had got him, the gun in the stiffly up-stretched arms. It was a Schmeisser machine-pistol all right. I shifted the torch. There was only one other to be seen in the water and it wasn't Quinn, he'd either dived under the Firecrest or was sheltering under the upturned wreck of the dinghy. I fired twice more at the second figure and he started to scream. The screaming went on for two or three seconds, then stopped in a shuddering gurgle. I heard the sound of someone beside me on the deck being violently sick over the side. Charlotte Skouras. But I'd no time to stay and comfort Charlotte Skouras, she'd no damned right to be out on deck anyway. I had urgent matters to attend to, such as preventing Uncle Arthur from cleaving Torbay's old stone pier in half. The townspeople would not have liked it. Uncle Arthur's idea of midships differed sharply from mine, he'd brought the Firecrest round in a three-quarter circle. He would have been the ideal man at the helm of one of those ram-headed Phoenician galleys that specialised in cutting the opposition in two, but as a helmsman in Torbay harbour he Jacked something. I jumped into the wheelhouse, pulled the throttle all the way to astern and spun the wheel to port. I jumped out again and pulled Charlotte Skouras away before she got her head knocked off by one of the barnacle-encrusted piles that fronted the pier. Whether or not we grazed the pier was impossible to say but we sure as hell gave the barnacles a nasty turn.

I moved back into the wheelhouse, taking Charlotte Skouras with me. I was breathing heavily. All this jumping in and out through wheelhouse doors took it out of a man. I said: "With all respects, sir, what the hell were you trying to do?"

"Me?" He was as perturbed as a hibernating bear in January, "Is something up, then?"

I moved the throttle to slow ahead, took the wheel from him and brought the Firecrest round till we were due north on a compass bearing. I said: "Keep it there, please," and did some more traversing with the searchlight. The waters around were black and empty, there was no sign even of the dinghy. I'd expected to see every light in Torbay lit up like a naval review, those four shots, even the Lilliput's sharp, light-weighted cracks, should have had them all on their feet. But nothing, no sign, no movement at all. The gin bottle levels would be lower than ever. I looked at the compass: north-twenty-west. Like the honey-bee for the flower, the iron filing for the magnet, Uncle Arthur was determinedly heading straight for the shore again. I took the wheel from him, gently but firmly, and said: "You came a bit close to the pier back there, sir."

"I believe I did." He took out a handkerchief and wiped his monocle, "Damn glass misted up just at the wrong moment, I trust, Calvert, that you weren't just firing at random out there." Uncle Arthur had become a good deal more bellicose in the past hour or so: he'd had a high regard for Hunslett.

"I got Jacques and Kramer. Jacques was the handy one with the automatic arms. He's dead. I think Kramer is too. Quinn got away." What a set-up, I thought bleakly, what a set-up. Alone with Uncle Arthur on the high seas in the darkness of the night. I'd always known that his eyesight, even in optimum conditions, was pretty poor: but I'd never suspected that, when the sun was down, he was virtually blind as a bat. But unfortunately, unlike the bat, Uncle Arthur wasn't equipped with a built-in radar which would enable him to shy clear of rocks, headlands, islands and such-like obstructions of a similarly permanent and final nature with which we might go bump in the dark. To all intents and purposes I was single-handed. This called for a radical revision in plans only I didn't see how I could radically revise anything.

"Not too bad," Uncle Arthur said approvingly, "Pity about Quinn, but otherwise not too bad at all. The ranks of the ungodly are being satisfactorily depleted. Do you think they'll come after us?"

"No. For four reasons. One, they won't know yet what has happened. Two, both their sorties this evening have gone badly and they won't be in a hurry to try any more boarding expeditions for some time. Three, they'd use the tender for this job, not the Shangri-la and if they get that tender a hundred yards I've lost all faith in Demerara sugar. Four, there's mist or fog coming up. The lights of Torbay are obscured already. They can't follow us because they can't find us."

Till that moment the only source of illumination we'd had in the wheelhouse had come from the reflected light of the compass lamp. Suddenly the overhead light came on. Charlotte Skouras's hand was on the switch. Her face was haggard and she was staring at me as if I were the thing from outer space. Not one of those admiring affectionate looks.

"What kind of man are you, Mr. Calvert?" No "Philip" this time. Her voice was lower and huskier than ever and it had a shake in it. "You — you're not human. You kill two men and go on speaking calmly and reasonably as if nothing had happened. What in God's name are you, a hired killer? It's — it's unnatural. Have you no feelings, no emotions, no regrets?"

"Yes, I have. I'm sorry I didn't kill Quinn too."

She stared at me with something like horror in her face, then switched her gaze to Uncle Arthur. She said to him and her voice was almost a whisper: "I saw that man, Sir Arthur. I saw his face being blown apart by the bullets. Mr. Calvert could have — could have arrested him, held him up and handed him over to the police. But he didn't. He killed him. And the other. It was slow and deliberate. Why, why, why?"