The Golden Rendezvous

by Alistair MacLean

  “I’m not sure at all. But if we don’t make a move until we’re certain of success we might as well jump over the side now. Ready?”

  “What are you going to do? Once you get inside?” She was scared, and stalling. Not that I was happy myself.

  “Send an SOS on the distress frequency. Warn every vessel within listening range that the Campari has been seized by force and is intending to intercept a bullion-carrying vessel at such and such a spot. Within a few hours everyone in North America will know the situation. That’ll get action all right.”

  “Yes.” A long pause. “That’ll get action. The first action it will get is that Carreras will discover that his guard is missing—and where had you thought of hiding him?”

  “In the Atlantic.”

  She shivered briefly, then said obliquely: “I think perhaps Carreras knows you better than I do … The guard’s missing. They’ll know it must be one of the crew responsible. They’ll soon find out that the only guard keeping an eye on the crew who wasn’t awake all the time is the boy outside the sick-bay.” She was silent for a moment, then went on so softly that I could hardly hear her above the storm: “I can just see Carreras ripping those bandages off your leg and finding out that your thigh is not broken. You know what will happen then?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me.” She said the words calmly, matter-of-factly, as if they were of no particular significance. “Another thing. You said everybody would know the set-up within a few hours. The two radio operators Carreras has planted on the Ticonderoga will know immediately. They will immediately radio the news back to the Campari, to Carreras.”

  “After I’m finished in the wireless office no one will ever be able to send or receive on that set again.”

  “All right. So you’ll smash it up. That itself would be enough to let Carreras know what you’ve done. And you can’t smash up every radio receiver on the Campari. You can’t for instance, get near the ones in the drawing-room. Everybody will know, you say. That means that the generalissimo and his government will know also: and then all the stations on the island will do nothing but keep up a non-stop broadcast of news. Carreras is bound to hear it.”

  I said nothing. I thought vaguely that I must have lost a great deal of blood. Her mind was working about ten times as quickly and clearly as mine. Not that that made her very smart.

  She went on: “You and the bo’sun seem very sure that Carreras won’t let us—the passengers and crew—live. Perhaps you think it’s because he can’t have any witnesses, that whatever advantage the generalissimo gained from getting this money would be offset over and over again by the world wide reaction against him if the world knew what he had done. Perhaps——”

  “Reaction!” I said. “Reaction! He’d find the American and British navies and air forces on his doorstep the following morning and that would be the end of the generalissimo. Not even Russia would raise a hand to help him, they wouldn’t as much as rattle a rocket. Of course he can’t afford to let anyone know. He’d be finished.”

  “In fact, he couldn’t even afford to let anyone know he’d made the attempt? So, as soon as Carreras picks up the news of your SOS, he gets rid of all the witnesses—permanently—sheers off, trans-ships to this other vessel that’s waiting and that’s that.”

  I stood there saying nothing. My mind felt dull and heavy and tired, my body even more so. I tried to tell myself it was just the drug Marston had pumped into me, but it wasn’t that, I knew it wasn’t that, the sense of defeat is the most powerful opiate of all. I said, hardly knowing what I was saying: “Well, at least we would have saved the gold.”

  “The gold!” You had to be a multi-millionaire’s daughter before you could put all that scorn into your voice when you mentioned the word “gold.” “Who cares a fig for all the gold in the world? What’s gold compared to your life and my life, my mother’s and father’s and the lives of everyone on the Campari? How much money did Carreras say the Fort Ticonderoga was carrying?”

  “You heard him. A hundred and fifty million dollars.”

  “A hundred and fifty million! Daddy could raise that in a week and still have as much again left.”

  “Lucky Daddy,” I muttered. Light-headed, that’s what I was getting.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. It all seemed such a good idea when MacDonald and I worked it out, Susan.”

  “I’m sorry.” She caught my right hand in both of hers and held it tight. “I’m truly sorry, Johnny.”

  “Where did you get this ‘Johnny’ business from?” I mumbled.

  “I like it. What’s good enough for Captain Bullen—your hands are like ice;” she exclaimed softly. “And you’re shivering.” Gentle fingers pushed up under my hood. “And your forehead is burning. Running a temperature and fever. You’re not well, oh, you’re not well. Come on back down to the sick-bay, Johnny. Please.”

  “No.”

  “Please!”

  “Don’t nag at me, woman.” I pushed myself wearily off the ventilator. “Come on.”

  “Where are you going?” She was quickly beside me, her arm in mine, and I was glad to hang on.

  “Cerdan. Our mysterious friend Mr. Cerdan. Do you realise that we know practically nothing about Mr. Cerdan—except that he seems to be the one who lies back and lets the others do all the work? Carreras and Cerdan—they seem to be the king-pins and maybe Carreras isn’t the boss after all. But I do know this: if I could get a knife sticking into the throat or a gun jabbing into the back of either of those men I would have a big card to play in this game.”

  “Come on, Johnny,” she pleaded. “Come on down below.”

  “All right, so I’m loopy. But it’s still true. If I could shove either of those men into the drawing-room ahead of me and threaten the two guards with his death if they don’t drop their guns, I rather think they would. With two machine-guns and all the men in there to help I could do a lot on a night like this. I’m not crazy, Susan, just desperate, like I said.”

  “You can hardly stand.” There was a note of desperation in her voice now.

  “That’s why you’re here. To hold me up. Carreras is out of the question. He’ll be on the bridge and that’ll be the most heavily-guarded place on the ship, because it’s the most important place.” I winced and shrank back into a corner as a great blue-white jagged streak of forked lightning, almost directly overhead, flickered and stabbed through the black wall of cumulonimbus clouds and the driving rain, momentarily illuminating every detail of the Campari’s decks in its blinding glare. The curiously flat explosive clap of thunder was muffled, lost in the teeth of the gale.

  “That helps,” I muttered. “Thunder, lightning, a tropical rainstorm and moving into the heart of a hurricane. King Lear should have seen this little lot. He’d never have complained of his blasted heath again.”

  “Macbeth,” she said. “That was Macbeth.”

  “Oh, hell,” I said. She was getting as nutty as I was. I took her arm or she took mine, I forget which. “Come on. We’re too exposed here.”

  A minute later we were down on “A” deck, crouched against a bulkhead. I said: “Finesse will get us nowhere. I’m going into the central passageway, straight into Cerdan’s cabin. I’ll stick my hand in my pocket, pretend I have a gun. Stay at the entrance to the passageway, warn me if anyone comes.”

  “He’s not in,” she said. We were standing at the starboard for’ard end of the accommodation, just outside Cerdan’s sleeping cabin. “He’s not at home. There’s no light on.”

  “The curtains will be drawn,” I said impatiently. “The ship’s fully darkened. I’ll bet Carreras hasn’t even got the navigation lights on.” We shrank against the bulkhead as another lightning flash reached down from the darkened clouds, seemed almost to dance on the tip of the Campari’s mast. “I won’t be long.”

  “Wait!” She held me with both hands. “The curtain’s aren’t drawn. That flash—I co
uld see everything inside the cabin.”

  “You could see——” for some reason I’d lowered my voice almost to a whisper. “Anyone inside?”

  “I couldn’t see all the inside. It was just for a second.”

  I straightened, pressed my face hard against the window, and stared inside. The darkness in the cabin was absolute—absolute, that is, until another forked finger of lightning lit up the entire upperworks of the Campari once more. Momentarily, I saw my own hooded face and staring eyes reflected back at me in the glass, then exclaimed involuntarily for I had seen something else again.

  “What is it?” Susan demanded huskily. “What’s wrong?”

  “This is wrong.” I fished out Marston’s torch, hooded it with my hand and shone it downwards through the glass.

  The bed was up against the bulkhead, almost exactly beneath the window. Cerdan was lying on the bed, clothed and awake, his eyes staring up as if hypnotised by the beam of the torch. Wide eyes, staring eyes. His white hair was not just where his white hair had been, it had slipped back, revealing his own hair beneath. Black hair, jet black hair, with a startling streak of iron-grey almost exactly in the middle. Black hair with an iron-grey streak? Where had I seen somebody with hair like that? When had I ever heard of somebody with hair like that? All of a sudden, I knew it was “when” not “where”: I knew the answer. I switched off the light.

  “Cerdan!” There was shock and disbelief and utter lack of comprehension in Susan’s voice. “Cerdan! Bound hand and foot and tied to his bed so that he can’t move an inch. Cerdan! But—no, no!” She was ready to give up. “Oh, Johnny, what does it all mean?”

  “I know what it all means.” No question now but that I knew what it all meant, and I wished to heaven I didn’t. I’d only thought I’d been afraid before, the time I had only been guessing. But the time for guessing was past, oh, my God, it was past. I knew the truth now and the truth was worse than I had ever dreamed. I fought down the rising panic and said steadily through dry lips: “Have you ever robbed a grave, Susan?”

  “Have I ever——” She broke off and when her voice came again there were tears in it. “We’re both worn out, Johnny. Let’s get down below. I want to go back to the sick-bay.”

  “I have news for you, Susan. I’m not mad. But I’m not joking. And I hope to God that grave’s not empty.” I caught her arm to lead her away, and as I did the lightning flashed again and her eyes were wild and full of fear. I wondered what mine looked like to her.

  IX.

  Thursday 10 p.m.—Midnight

  What with the darkness, my bad leg, the intermittent lightning, the wild rearing, wave-top staggering and plunging of the Campari and the need to use the greatest caution all the way, it took us a good fifteen minutes to reach number four hold, far back on the after-deck. And when we got there, pulled back the tarpaulin, loosened a couple of battens and peered down into the near Stygian depths of the hold, I wasn’t at all sure that I was glad we had come.

  Along with several tools, I’d filched an electric lantern from the bo’sun’s store on the way there, and though it didn’t give off much of a light it gave off enough to let me see that the floor of the hold was a shambles. I’d secured for sea after leaving Carracio, but I hadn’t secured for a near-hurricane, for the excellent reason that whenever the weather was bad the Campari had invariably run in the other direction.

  But now Carreras had taken us in the wrong direction and he either hadn’t bothered or forgotten to secure for the worsening weather conditions. Forgotten, almost certainly: for number four hold presented a threat, to say the least, to the lives of everybody aboard, Carreras and his men included. At least a dozen heavy crates, the weight of one or two of which could be measured in tons, had broken loose and were sliding and lurching across the floor of the hold with every cork-screwing pitch of the Campari, alternatively crashing into the secured cargo aft or the bulkhead for’ard. My guess was that this wasn’t doing the for’ard bulkhead any good: and just let the motion of the Campari change from pitching to rolling, especially as we neared the centre of the hurricane, and the massive deadweights of those sliding crates would begin to assault the sides of the ship. Buckled plates, torn rivets and a leak that couldn’t be repaired would only be a matter of time.

  To make matters worse, Carreras’s men hadn’t bothered to remove the broken splintered sides of the wooden crates in which they and the guns had been slung aboard: they, too, were sliding about the floor with every movement of the ship, being continually smashed and becoming progressively smaller in size as they were crushed between the sliding crates and bulkheads, pillars and fixed cargo. Not the least frightening part of it was the din, the almost continuous goose-pimpling metallic screech as iron-banded cases slid over steel decks, a high-pitched grating scream that set your teeth on edge, a scream that invariably ended, predictably yet always unexpectedly, in a jarring crash that shook the entire hold as the crates brought up against something solid. And every sound in that echoing, reverberating, emptily cavernous hold was magnified ten times. All in all, the floor of that hold wasn’t the place I would have chosen for an afternoon nap.

  I gave the electric lantern to Susan, after shining it on a vertical steel ladder tapering down into the depths of the hold.

  “Down you go,” I said. “For heaven’s sake, hang on to that ladder. There’s a baffle about three feet high at the bottom of it. Get behind it. You should be safe there.”

  I watched her climb slowly down, manoeuvred two of the battens back into place over my head—no easy job with one hand—and left them like that. Maybe they would be jarred loose, they might even fall down into the hold. It was a chance I had to take, they could only be secured from above, and the covering tarpaulin could also only be secured from above. There was nothing I could do about that either. If anyone was crazy enough to be out on deck that night—especially as Carreras had no lifelines rigged—the chances were in that blinding storm that they wouldn’t even notice the flapping corner of the tarpaulin or, if they did, they would only either pass it by or at the most secure it. If someone was curious enough to go to the length of pushing back a batten—well, there was no point in worrying about that.

  I went down the hatch slowly, awkwardly, painfully—Marston had a higher opinion of his anæsthetics than I had—and joined Susan on the floor behind the baffle. At this level the noise was redoubled, the sight of those head-high behemoths of crates charging across the hold more terrifying than ever. Susan said: “The coffins. Where are they?” All I had told her was that I wanted to examine some coffins: I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what we might find in them.

  “They’re boxed. In wooden crates. On the other side of the hold.”

  “The other side!” She twisted her head, lined up the lantern and looked at the sliding wreckage and crates screeching and tearing their way across the floor. “The other side! We would —we would be killed before we got halfway there.”

  “Like enough, but I can’t see anything else for it. Hold on a minute, will you?”

  “You! With your leg! You can’t even hobble. Oh, no!” Before I could stop her she was over the baffle and half running, half staggering across the hold, tripping and stumbling as the ship lurched and her feet caught on broken planks of wood, but always managing to regain balance, to stop suddenly or dodge nimbly as a crate slid her away. She was agile, I had to admit, and quick on her feet: but she was exhausted with sea-sickness, with bracing herself for the past hours against the constant violent lurching of the Campari: she’d never make it.

  But make it she did, and I could see her on the other side flashing her torch around. My admiration for her spirit was equalled only by my exasperation at her actions. What was she going to do with those boxed coffins when she found them: carry them back across the floor, one under each arm.

  But they weren’t there, for after she had looked everywhere she shook her head. And then she was coming back and I was shouting out a warning, but the
warning stuck in my throat and was only a whisper and she wouldn’t have heard it anyway. A plunging, careening crate, propelled by a sudden viscious lurch as the Campari plunged headlong into an exceptional trough, caught her back and shoulder and pitched her to the floor, pushing her along before its massive weight as if it were imbued with an almost human—or inhuman—quality of evil and malignance and determined to crush the life out of her against the for’ard bulkhead. And then, in the last second before she would have died, the Campari straightened, the crate screeched to a halt less than a yard from the bulkhead and Susan was lying there between crate and bulkhead, very still. I must have been at least fifteen feet away from her but I have no recollection of covering the distance from the baffle to where she lay and then back again, but I must have done for suddenly we were there in the place of safety and she was clinging to me as if I were the last hope left in the world.

  “Susan!” My voice was hoarse, a voice belonging to someone else altogether. “Susan, are you hurt?”

  She clung even closer. By some miracle she still held the lantern clutched in her right hand. It was round the back of my neck somewhere but the reflected beam from the ship’s side gave enough light to see by. … Her mask had been torn off, her face was scratched and bleeding, her hair a bedraggled mess, her clothes soaked and her heart going like a captive bird’s. For an incongruous moment an unbidden recollection touched my mind, a recollection of a very cool, very poised, sweetly-malicious, pseudo-solicitous young lady asking me about cocktails only two days ago in Carracio, but the vision faded as soon as it had come, the incongruity was too much.

  “Susan!” I said urgently. “Are you——”

  “I’m not hurt.” She gave a long tremendous sigh that was more shudder than sigh. “I was just too scared to move.” She eased her grip a trifle, looked at me with green eyes enormous in the pallor of her face, then buried her face in my shoulder. I thought she was going to choke me.