The Dark Crusader

‘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 CO

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 torch.’

‘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.”’

‘A charming fellow. We drown peacefully and even if we do wash up somewhere there’ll be no bullet holes to start people asking questions.’

‘But a post-mortem can always show the presence of poison or narcotics –’

‘Any post-mortem carried out on us,’ I interrupted heavily, ‘could be made without the doctor taking his hands from his pockets. If there are no broken bones you can’t determine anything about the cause of death from a couple of nice clean shiny skeletons which would be all that was left after the denizens of the deep had finished with us. Or maybe the sharks eat bones, too: I wouldn’t know.’

‘Do you have to talk like that?’ she asked coldly.

‘I’m only trying to cheer myself up.’ I handed her a couple of lifebelts. ‘Adjust the shoulder straps so that you can wear them both round your waist, one above the other. Be careful that you don’t strike the CO

release accidentally. Wait till you are in the water before you inflate.’ I was already shrugging into my own harness. She appeared to be taking her time about adjusting the straps so I said: ‘Please hurry.’

‘There is no hurry,’ she said. ‘Henry said, “I suppose we’ll have to wait a couple of hours before we do anything,’ and Fleck said, “Yes, that at least.” Maybe they’re going to wait until it gets really dark.’

‘Or maybe they don’t want the crew to see anything. The reasons don’t matter. What does matter is that the two-hour delay refers to the time when they intend ditching us. They could come for us any time. And you’re overlooking the fact that when they do discover we’re missing the first thing they’ll do is back-track and search. I don’t much fancy being run down by a schooner or chopped to pieces by a propeller blade or just used for a little target practice. The sooner we’re gone the less chance we have of being picked up when they do discover we’re missing.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ she admitted.

It’s like the colonel told you.’ I said. ‘Bentall thinks of everything.’

She didn’t think that worth any comment so we finished fixing the lifebelts in silence. I gave her the torch and asked her to hold it in position while I climbed up the ladder with the bottle-screw and two hardwood battens and set about opening the hatch. I placed one of the hardwood battens on the top rung, set one end of the bottle-screw on the wood directly above the rung and unscrewed the upper eyebolt until it was firmly against the other batten which I’d placed under the hatch, to spread the load. I could hear the rain drumming furiously on the hatch and shivered involuntarily at the prospect of the imminent soaking, which was pretty silly when I came to consider just how much wetter I would be a few seconds later.