Alistair MacLean - When Eight Bells Toll

"You get nothing?"

"I get my salary, the size of which I'd rather not discuss, as It's a sore point. Civil Servants are not permitted to accept gratuities."

"You mean to say you get beaten up, shot down, half-drowned and suffered another couple of murder attempts just for a lousy pay cheque? What makes you tick, Calvert? Why the hell do you do it?"

"That's not an original question. I ask myself the same question about twenty times a day, rather more often recently. It's time we were gone."

"I'll get the boys up. They'll be tickled pink by those gold watches or whatever the insurance boys will be handing over. Engraved, of course. We insist on that."

"The reward will be in cash, not kind. Depends how much of the stolen goods are recovered. We're pretty sure to recover all the Nantesville's cargo. Chances are that well recover the lot. The award is ten per cent. Yours will be five. The minimum you and your boys will pick up will be four hundred thousand pounds: the maximum will be eight hundred and fifty. Thousand pounds, I mean."

"Say that in English." He looked as if the London Post Office Tower had fallen on top of him. So I said it again, and after a time he looked as if only a telegraph pole had fallen on him and said carefully: "At rates like that, a man might expect a fair bit of co-operation. Say no more. Put right out of your head any thoughts you had of advertising in the Telegraph. Tim Hutchinson is your man."

And Tim Hutchinson was undoubtedly my man. On a night like that, dark as doomsday, rain sluicing down and a thickening mist making it impossible — for me, at least — to tell the difference between a naturally breaking sea and a wave foaming over a reef, Tim Hutchinson was my man. Cheap at half a million.

He was one of that rare breed, that very rare breed, of naturals to whom the sea is truly home. Twenty years' daily polishing and refining in every conceivable condition a rarely-bestowed gift with which you must be born in the first place and anyone can be like this. Just as the great Grand Prix drivers, the Carraciolas and Nuvolaris and Clarks, operate on a level incomprehensible to highly competent drivers of very fast cars, so Hutchinson operated on a level incomprehensible to the finest of amateur yachtsmen. Search your ocean racing clubs and Olympic yachting teams the world over and you will not find men like this. They are to be found, and even then so very seldom, only in the ranks of the professional deep-sea fishermen.

Those huge hands on throttle and wheel had the delicacy of a moth. He had the night-sight of a barn owl and an ear which could infallibly distinguish between waves breaking in the open sea, on reefs or on shores: he could invariably tell the size and direction of seas coming at him out of the darkness and mist and touch wheel or throttle as need be: he had an inbuilt computer which provided instant correlation of wind, tide, current and our own speed and always let him know exactly where he was. And I'll swear he could smell land, even on a lee shore and with the rest of us suffering olfactory paralysis from the fumes of the big black cigars which seemed to be an inseparable part of the man. It required only ten minutes beside him to realise that one's ignorance of the sea and ships was almost total. A chastening discovery.

He took the Charmaine out through the Scylla and Charybdis of that evil alleged harbour entrance under full throttle. Foaming white-fanged reefs reached out at us, bare feet away, on either side. He didn't seem to notice them. He certainly didn't look at them. The two "boys" he'd brought with him, a couple of stunted lads of about six foot two or thereabouts, yawned prodigiously. Hutchinson located the Firecrest a hundred yards before I could even begin to imagine I could see any shape at all and brought the Charmaine alongside as neatly as I could part my car by the kerb in broad daylight — on one of my better days, that was. I went aboard the Firecrest to the vast alarm of Uncle Arthur and Charlotte who'd heard no whisper of our arrival, explained the situation, introduced Hutchinson and went back aboard the Charmaine. Fifteen minutes later, the radio call over, I was back aboard the Firecrest.

Uncle Arthur and Tim Hutchinson were already thick as thieves. The bearded Australian giant was extremely courteous and respectful, calling Uncle Arthur "Admiral" every other sentence while Uncle Arthur was plainly delighted and vastly relieved to have him on board. If I felt this was a slight on my own seaman-like qualities, I was undoubtedly correct.

"Where are we off to now?" Charlotte Skouras asked. I was disappointed to see that she was just as relieved as Uncle Arthur.

"Dubh Sgeir," I said. "To pay a call on Lord Kirkside and his charming daughter."

"Dubh Sgeir!" She seemed taken aback. "I thought you said the answer lay in Eilean Oran and Craigmore?"

"So I did. The answers to some essential preliminary questions. But the end of the road lies in Dubh Sgeir. And the foot of the rainbow."

"You talk in riddles," she said impatiently.

"Not to me, he doesn't," Hutchinson said jovially. "The foot of the rainbow, ma'am. That's where the pot of gold lies."

"Here and now I'd settle for a pot of coffee," I said. "Coffee for four and I'll make it with my own fair hands."

"I think I would rather go to bed," Charlotte said. "I am very tired."

"You made me drink your coffee," I said threateningly. "Now you drink mine. Fair's fair."

"If you are quick, then."

I was quick. I'd four cups on a little tin tray in nothing flat, a powerful mixture of instant coffee, milk and sugar in all of them and a little something extra in one of them. There were no complaints about the coffee. Hutchinson drained his cup and said: "Can't see why you three shouldn't get your heads down for a little. Unless you think I need help?"

No one thought he needed help. Charlotte Skouras was the first to go, saying she felt very sleepy, which I didn't doubt. She sounded it. Uncle Arthur and I left a moment later, Tim Hutchinson promising to call me when we neared the landing stage on the west side of Dubh Sgeir. Uncle Arthur wrapped himself in a rug on the saloon settee. I went to my own cabin and lay down.

I lay for three minutes then rose, picked up a three-cornered file, softly opened my cabin door and as softly knocked on Charlotte's door. There was no reply, so I opened the door, passed in, silently closed it and switched on the lights.

She was asleep all right, she was a million miles away. She hadn't even managed to make it to bed, she was lying on the carpet, still fully clothed, I put her on the bunk and pulled a couple of blankets over her. I pushed up a sleeve and examined the mark left by the rope burn.

It wasn't a very big cabin and it took me only a minute to find what I was looking for.

It made a pleasant change and a very refreshing one to transfer myself from the Firecrest to land without that damned clammy scuba suit impeding every stroke or step of the way.

How Tim Hutchinson located that old stone pier in the rain, the fog and the darkness was something that would have been for ever beyond me — if he hadn't told me later that night. He sent me to the bows with a torch in my hand and damned if the thing didn't loom out of the darkness as if he'd gone in on a radio bearing. He went into reverse, brought the bows, plunging heavily in the deep troughs, to within two feet of the pier, waited till I picked my moment to jump off then went full astern and disappeared into the fog and darkness. I tried to imagine Uncle Arthur executing that lot, but my imagination wasn't up to it. It boggled. Uncle Arthur, thank heaven, slept the sleep of the just. Drake was in his hammock and a thousand miles away, dreaming all the time of W.C.I.

The path from the landing stage to the plateau above was steep and crumbling and someone had carelessly forgotten to equip with a handrail on the seaward side. I was in no way heavily burdened. All I was carrying apart from the weight of my own years was a torch, gun and coil of rope — I'd neither the intention nor the expectation of doing a Douglas Fairbanks on the outer battlements of the Dubh Sgeir castle, but experience had taught me that a rope was the most essential piece of equipment to carry along on a jaunt on a precipitously walled island — but even so I was breathing pretty heavily by the time I reached the top.