The Dark Crusader. Alistair MacLeanЧитать онлайн книгу.
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