The Dark Crusader

The Dark Crusader
Alistair MacLean

A classic tale of espionage, secret missions and exotic locations which out-Bonds Bond, from the acclaimed master of action and suspense.Eight job advertisements.Eight jobs. Eight specialists in modern technology required.Eight scientists to fill them.Applicants to be married, with no children, and prepared to travel. Highly persuasive salaries.One criminal mastermind.Eight positions filled. Eight scientists - and their wives - disappear. Completely.One secret agent to stop him.Advertisment no.9. Sydney, Australia. Fuel specialist required. Looks like a job for John Bentall…

The Dark Crusader

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

Copyright (#u03a9e4b6-f376-52fc-bd04-20de0e9a040a)

HarperCollins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1961

Copyright © Devoran Trustees Ltd 1961

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins eBooks.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780006165439

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007289257

Version: 2018-04-17

To Douglas and Violet

Contents

Cover (#ub9fb03bc-c177-5309-a629-accab1518877)

Title Page (#u9cf6ece8-8b49-544d-8226-dbd30eafe845)

Copyright (#ue4891d4e-f287-54d6-8483-3d166c03c3cb)

Prologue (#uf0eb8adc-a7a1-56ec-87a0-dc459aaecbd0)

I (#u699a272a-5e22-50b9-b83d-9a7614e59c25)Tuesday 3 a.m.–5.30 a.m. (#u699a272a-5e22-50b9-b83d-9a7614e59c25)

II (#uaa4c4cd5-3d8f-570f-a637-37708340ad27)Tuesday 8.30 a.m.–7 p.m. (#uaa4c4cd5-3d8f-570f-a637-37708340ad27)

III (#u257098a5-572a-5e92-93c8-f949ed807981)Tuesday 7 p.m.–Wednesday 9 a.m. (#u257098a5-572a-5e92-93c8-f949ed807981)

IV (#litres_trial_promo)Wednesday 3 p.m.–10 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)

V (#litres_trial_promo)Wednesday 10 p.m.–Thursday 5 a.m. (#litres_trial_promo)

VI (#litres_trial_promo)Thursday noon–Friday 1.30 a.m. (#litres_trial_promo)

VII (#litres_trial_promo)Friday 1.30 a.m.–3.30 a.m. (#litres_trial_promo)

VIII (#litres_trial_promo)Friday 3.30 a.m.–6 a.m. (#litres_trial_promo)

IX (#litres_trial_promo)Friday 6 a.m.–8 a.m. (#litres_trial_promo)

X (#litres_trial_promo)Friday 10 a.m.–1p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)

XI (#litres_trial_promo)Friday 1 p.m.–6 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)

XII (#litres_trial_promo)Saturday 3 a.m.–8 a.m. (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PROLOGUE (#u03a9e4b6-f376-52fc-bd04-20de0e9a040a)

A small dusty man in a small dusty room. That’s how I always thought of him, just a small dusty man in a small dusty room.

No cleaning woman was ever allowed to enter that office with its soot-stained heavily curtained windows overlooking Birdcage Walk: and no person, cleaner or not, was ever allowed inside unless Colonel Raine himself were there.

And no one could ever have accused the colonel of being allergic to dust.

It lay everywhere. It lay on the oak-stained polished floor surrounds that flanked the threadbare carpet. It filmed the tops of bookcases, filing cabinets, radiators, chair-arms and telephones: it lay smeared streakily across the top of the scuffed knee-hole desk, the dust-free patches marking where the papers or books had recently been pushed to one side: motes danced busily in a sunbeam that slanted through an uncurtained crack in the middle of a window: and, trick of the light or not, it needed no imagination at all to see a patina of dust on the thin brushed-back grey hair of the man behind the desk, to see it embedded in deeply trenched lines on the grey sunken cheeks, the high receding forehead.

And then you saw the eyes below the heavy wrinkled lids and you forgot all about the dust: eyes with the hard jewelled glitter of a peridot stone, eyes of the clear washed-out aquamarine of a Greenland glacier, but not so warm.

He rose to greet me as I crossed the room, offered me a cold hard bony hand like a gardening tool, waved me to a chair directly opposite the light-coloured veneered panel so incongruously let into the front of his mahogany desk, and seated himself, sitting very straight, hands clasped lightly on the dusty desk before him.

‘Welcome home, Bentall.’ The voice matched the eyes, you could almost hear the far-off crackling of dried ice. ‘You made fast time. Pleasant trip?’

‘No, sir. Some Midlands textile tycoon put off the plane to make room for me at Ankara wasn’t happy. I’m to hear from his lawyers and as a sideline he’s going to drive the B.E.A. off the European airways. Other passengers sent me to Coventry, the stewardesses ignored me completely and it was as bumpy as hell. Apart from that, it was a fine trip.’

‘Such things happen,’ he said precisely. An almost imperceptible tic at the left-hand corner of the thin mouth might have been interpreted as a smile, all you needed was a strong imagination, but it was hard to say, twenty-five years of minding other people’s business in the Far East seemed to have atrophied the colonel’s cheek muscles. ‘Sleep?’