The Dark Crusader Read online

  When I awoke it was just on noon. The sun was almost directly overhead, but the chair shades were wide and the trade winds cool. Captain Fleck had just seated himself on the side of the hatchway. Apparently whatever business he had to attend to was over, and guessing the nature of that business was no trick at all, he’d just finished a long and difficult interview with a bottle of whisky. His eyes were slightly glazed and even at three feet to windward I’d no difficulty at all in smelling the Scotch. But conscience or maybe something else had got into him for he was carrying a tray with glasses, a bottle of sherry and a small stone jar.

  ‘We’ll send you a bite of food by-and-by.’ He sounded almost apologetic. ‘Thought you might like a snifter, first?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I looked at the stone jar. ‘What’s in it? Cyanide?’

  ‘Scotch,’ he said shortly. He poured out two drinks, drained his own at a gulp and nodded at Marie who was lying facing us, her face almost completely hidden under her windblown hair. ‘How about Mrs Bentall?’

  ‘Let her sleep. She needs it. Who’s giving you the orders for all of this, Fleck?’

  ‘Eh?’ He was off-balance, but only for a second, his tolerance to alcohol seemed pretty high. ‘Orders? What orders? Whose orders?’

  ‘What are you going to do with us?’

  ‘Impatient to find out, aren’t you, Bentall?’

  ‘I just love it here. Not very communicative, are you?’

  ‘Have another drink.’

  ‘I haven’t even started this one. How much longer do you intend keeping us here?’

  He thought it over for a bit, then said slowly: ‘I don’t know. Your guess isn’t so far out, I’m not the principal in this. There was somebody very anxious indeed to see you.’ He gulped down some more whisky. ‘But he isn’t so sure now.’

  ‘He might have told you that before you took us from the hotel.’

  ‘He didn’t know then. Radio, not five minutes ago. He’s coming through again at 1900 hours – seven o’clock sharp. You’ll have your answer then. I hope you like it.’ There was something sombre in his voice that I didn’t find very encouraging. He switched his glance to Marie, looked at her for a long time in silence, then stirred. ‘Kind of a nice girl you got there, Bentall.’

  ‘Sure. That’s my wife, Fleck. Look the other way.’

  He turned slowly and looked at me, his face hard and cold. But there was something else in it too, I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

  ‘If I were ten years younger or maybe even half a bottle of whisky soberer,’ he said without animosity, ‘I’d have your front teeth for that, Bentall.’ He looked away across the green dazzle of the ocean, the glass of whisky forgotten in his hand. ‘I got a daughter just a year or two younger than her. Right now she’s in the University of California. Liberal Arts. Thinks her old man’s a captain in the Australian Navy.’ He swirled the drink around in his glass. ‘Maybe it’s better she keeps on thinking just that, maybe it’s better that she never sees me again. But if I knew I would never see her again …’

  I got it. I’m no Einstein but I don’t have to be beaten over the head more than a few times to make me see the obvious. The sun was hotter than ever, but I didn’t feel warm any more. I didn’t want him to realize that he had been talking to me, too, not just to himself, so I said: ‘You’re no Australian, are you, Fleck?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. You talk like one, but it’s an overlaid accent.’

  ‘I’m as English as you are,’ he growled. ’But my home’s in Australia.’

  ‘Who’s paying for all this, Fleck?’

  He rose abruptly to his feet, gathered up the empty glasses and bottles and went away without another word.

  It wasn’t until about half past five in the evening that Fleck came to tell us to get below. Maybe he’d spotted a vessel on the horizon and didn’t want to take the chance of anyone seeing us if they approached too closely, maybe he just thought we’d been on deck long enough. The prospect of returning to that stinking hole was no pleasure, but apart from the fact that both of us had slept nearly all day and felt rested again, we weren’t too reluctant to go: black cumulus thunderheads had swept up out of the east in the late afternoon, an obscured sun had turned the air cool and the rain wasn’t far away. It looked as if it were going to be a black and dirty night. The sort of night that would suit Captain Fleck very well indeed: the sort of night, I hoped, that would suit us even better.

  The hatch-cover dropped in place behind us and the bolt slid home. Marie gave a little shiver and hugged herself tightly.

  ‘Well, another night in the Ritz coming up. You should have asked for fresh batteries – that torch isn’t going to last us all night.’

  ‘It won’t have to. One way or another we’ve spent our last night on this floating garbage can. We’re leaving this evening, just as soon as it’s good and dark. If Fleck has his way we’ll be leaving with a couple of iron bars tied to our feet: if I have mine, we’ll leave without them. If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on Fleck.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she whispered. ‘You – you were sure that nothing was going to happen to us. Remember all the reasons you gave me when we arrived on board last night. You said Fleck was no killer.’

  ‘I still don’t think he is. Not by nature, anyway. He’s been drinking all day, trying to drown his conscience. But there are many things that can make a man do what he doesn’t want to do, even kill: threats, blackmail, a desperate need for money. I was speaking to him while you slept. It seems that whoever wanted me out here no longer needs me. What it was for I don’t know, but whatever it was the end appears to have been achieved without me.’

  ‘He told you that we – that we –’

  ‘He told me nothing, directly. He merely said that the person who had arranged the kidnap thought that he no longer wanted me – or us. The definite word is to come through at seven but from the way Fleck spoke there wasn’t much doubt about what the word is going to be. I think old Fleck’s got a soft spot for you and he spoke of you, by inference, as if you already belonged in the past. Very touching, very wistful.’

  She touched my arm, looked up at me with a strange expression I’d never seen before and said simply: ‘I’m scared. It’s funny, all of a sudden I look into the future and I don’t see it and I’m scared. Are you?’

  ‘Of course I’m scared,’ I said irritably. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think you are, it’s just something to say. I know you’re not afraid – not of death, anyway. It’s not that you’re any braver than the rest of us, it’s just that if death came your way you’d be so busy figuring, planning, calculating, scheming, working out a way to beat it that you’d never even see it coming except in an academic sort of way. You’re working out a way to beat it now, you’re sure you will beat it: death for you, death that even one chance in a million might avoid, would be the supreme insult.’ She smiled at me, rather self-consciously, then went on:

  ‘Colonel Raine told me a good deal about you. He said that when things are completely desperate and there’s no hope left, it’s in the nature of man to accept the inevitable, but he said you wouldn’t, not because it was any positive thing, but just because you wouldn’t even know how to set about giving up. He said he thought you were the one man he could ever be afraid of, for if you were strapped to an electric chair and the executioner was pulling the switch, you’d still be figuring a way to beat it.’ She’d been abstractly twisting one of my shirt buttons until it was just about off, but I said nothing, one shirt button more or less wasn’t going to matter very much that night, and now she looked up and smiled again to rob her next words of offence. ‘I think you’re a very arrogant man. I think you’re a man with a complete belief in himself. But one of these days you’re going to meet up with a situation where your self-belief is going to be of just no help at all. ’

  ‘Mark my words,’ I said nastily. ‘You forgot to say, “Mark my words.”’
/>   The smile faded and she turned away as the hatch opened. It was the brown-skinned Fijian boy, with soup, some sort of stew and coffee. He came and left without a word.

  I looked at Marie. ‘Ominous, eh?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said coldly.

  ‘Our Fijian friend. This morning a grin from ear to ear: tonight the look of a surgeon who’s just come out to tell you that his scalpel slipped.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s not the custom,’ I said patiently, ‘to crack gags and do a song-and-dance act when you’re bringing the last meal to the condemned man. The better penitentiaries frown on it.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said flatly. ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you want to sample this stuff?’ I went on. ‘Or will I just throw it away?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours. I’ll try.’

  It was worth the try. The soup was good, the stew better, the coffee excellent. The cook had made a miraculous recovery from the depths he’d plumbed that morning: or maybe they’d shot the old one. I’d more to think of. I drained my coffee and looked at Marie.

  ‘You can swim, I take it?’

  ‘Not very well,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I can float.’

  ‘Provided there are no iron bars tied to your feet.’ I nodded. ‘That’ll be enough. Would you like to do a little listening while I do a little work?’

  ‘Of course.’ She was getting round to forgiving me. We went for’ard and I pulled down a couple of boxes for her to stand on, just below the opening of the port ventilator.

  ‘You won’t miss much of what they say up top,’ I said. ‘Especially, you’ll hear everything that’s said in or by the radio room. Probably nothing much before seven, but you never know. I’m afraid you’re going to get a bit of a crick in the neck but I’ll relieve you as soon as I’m through.’

  I left her there, went back to the after end of the hold, climbed three steps up the iron ladder and made a rough estimate of the distance between the top rung and the bottom of the hatch-cover above. Then I came down and started rummaging around in the metal boxes in the starboard corner until I found a bottle-screw that suited me, picked up a couple of hardboard battens and stowed them away, together with the bottle-screw, behind some boxes.

  Back at the platform of wooden boxes where we’d spent the night I pushed aside the two loose battens in the outboard row, cautiously lifted down the boxes with the compasses and binoculars, shoved them to one side, took down the box with the aircraft-type lifebelts and emptied out the contents.

  There were twelve of the belts altogether, rubber and reinforced canvas covers with leather harness instead of the more usual tapes. In addition to the CO2 bottle and shark-repellant cylinder, each belt had another waterproof cylinder with a wire leading up to a small red lamp fixed on the left shoulder strap. There would be a battery inside that cylinder. I pressed the little switch on one of them and the lamp at once glowed a deep bright red, indication that the equipment, though obsolete, was not old and good augury for the operating efficiency of the gas and water-tightness of the inflated belts. But it wasn’t a thing to be left to chance: I picked out four belts at random and struck the release knob on the first of them.

  The immediate hiss of compressed gas wasn’t so terribly loud, I supposed, but inside that confined space it seemed as if everybody aboard the schooner must hear it. Certainly Marie heard it, for she jumped off her box and came quickly back into the pool of light cast by the suspended torch.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked quickly. ‘What made the noise?’

  ‘No rats, no snakes, no fresh enemies,’ I assured her. The hissing had now stopped and I held up a round, stiff, fully inflated lifebelt for her inspection. ‘Just testing. Seems O.K. I’ll test one or two more, but I’ll try to keep it quiet. Heard anything yet?’

  ‘Nothing. Plenty of talk, that is, Fleck and that Australian man. But it’s mostly about charts, courses, islands, cargoes, things like that. And their girl friends in Suva.’

  ‘That must be interesting.’

  ‘Not the way they tell it,’ she snapped.

  ‘Dreadful,’ I agreed. ‘Just what you were saying last night. Men are all the same. Better get back before you miss anything.’

  She gave me a long considering look but I was busy testing the other lifebelts, muffling the noise under the two blankets and the pillows. All four worked perfectly and when, after ten minutes, none showed any sign of deflation the chances seemed high that all the others were at least as good. I picked out another four, hid them behind some boxes, deflated the four I’d tested and replaced them in the box with the others. A minute later I’d all the battens and boxes back in place.

  I looked at my watch. It lacked fifteen minutes to seven. There was little enough time left. I went aft again, inspected the water drums with my torch: heavy canvas carrying straps, the shell concave to fit the back, five-inch-diameter spring-loaded lid on top, a spigot with tap at the bottom. They looked sound enough. I dragged two of them out of the corner, snapped open the lids and saw that they were nearly full. I closed the lids again and shook the drums as vigorously as possible. No water escaped, they were completely tight. I turned both the taps on full, let the water come gushing out on the deck – it wasn’t my schooner – then, when they were as empty as I could get them, mopped their interiors dry with a shirt from my case and made my way for’ard to Marie.

  ‘Anything yet?’ I whispered.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I’ll take over for a bit. Here’s the torch. I don’t know what things there are that go bump in the night in the Pacific Ocean, but it is possible that those lifebelts may get torn or just turn out to be perished through age. So I think we’ll take along a couple of empty water drums. They have a very high degree of buoyancy, far more than we require, so I thought we might as well use them to take along some clothes inside, whatever you think you’ll need. Don’t spend all night deciding what to take. Incidentally, I believe many women carry polythene bags in their cases for wrapping up this and that. Got any?’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘Leave one out, please.’

  ‘Right.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t know much about boats but I think this one has changed once or twice in the past hour.’

  ‘How do you figure that out?’ Old sea-dog Bentall, very tolerant to the landlubbers.

  ‘We’re not rolling any more, are we? The waves are passing us from the stern. And it’s the second or third change I’ve noticed.’

  She was right, the swell had died down considerably but what little was left was from aft. But I paid small attention to this, I knew the trades died away at night and local currents could set up all kinds of cross-motions in the water. It didn’t seem worth worrying about. She went away and I pressed close to the deckhead.

  All I could hear at first was a violently loud tinny rattling against the radiator, a rattling that grew more violent and persistent with every second that passed. Rain, and very heavy rain at that: it sounded like rain that meant to keep going on for a long time. Both Fleck and I would be happy about that.

  And then I heard Fleck’s voice. First the patter of hurrying footsteps, then his voice. I guessed that he was standing just inside the doorway of the wireless cabin.

  ‘Time you got your earphones on, Henry.’ The voice had a reverberating and queerly metallic timbre from its passage down the funnel-shaped ventilator, but was perfectly plain. ‘Just on schedule.’

  ‘Six minutes yet, boss.’ Henry, seated at the radio table, must have been five feet away from Fleck, yet his voice was hardly less distinct: the ventilator’s amplifying effects were as good as that.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Tune in.’

  I strained my ear against that ventilator until it seemed to me that I was about halfway up it, but I heard nothing further. After a couple of minutes I felt a tug at my sleeve.

  ‘All done,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Here’s the to
rch.’

  ‘Right.’ I jumped down, helped her up and murmured: ‘For heaven’s sake don’t move from there. Our friend Henry’s listening in for the final word right now.’

  I had little enough left to do and three or four minutes saw me all through. I stuffed a blanket inside the polythene bag and tied the neck securely: that made me the complete optimist. There was an awful lot of ‘ifs’ attached to that blanket. If we managed to break open the hatch, if we managed to get off the schooner without too many bullet holes in us, if we didn’t subsequently drown, if we weren’t eaten alive by sharks or barracuda or whatever else took a fancy to us during the hours of darkness, then it seemed like a good idea to have a water-soaked blanket to ward off sunstroke the following day. But I didn’t want to have to cope with its water-logged deadweight during the night: hence the polythene bag. I tied the bag on to one of the drums and had just finished stowing some clothes and cigarettes inside the same drum when Marie came aft and stood beside me.

  She said without preamble and in a quiet still voice, not scared: ‘They don’t need us any more.’

  ‘Well, at least my preparations haven’t been wasted. They discussed it?’

  ‘Yes. They might have been discussing the weather. I think you’re wrong about Fleck, he’s not worried about doing away with anyone. From the way he talked it was just an interesting problem. Henry asked him how they were going to get rid of us and Fleck said: “Let’s do it nice and quiet and civilized. We’ll tell them that the boss has changed his mind. We’ll tell them they’re to be delivered to him as soon as possible. We’ll forget and forgive, we’ll take them up to the cabin for a drink, slip them the knock-out drops then ease them soft and gently over the side.”’