“The ropes!” I said to MacDonald. I was already untying the one around my own waist. “The two ropes on the bedstead. Off with them. Throw them out the window.” Moments later the last of the three ropes had vanished, I was closing the window, pulling the curtains and calling softly for lights.
The lights came on. MacDonald and Bullen were as I had left them, both eyeing me with expressionless faces: MacDonald, because he knew my safe return meant at least possible success and did not want to betray his knowledge: Bullen, because I had told him that I intended to take over the bridge by force, and he was convinced that my method of return meant failure and didn’t want to embarrass me. Susan and Marston were by the dispensary door, both fully dressed, neither making any attempt to conceal disappointment. No time for greetings.
“Susan, on with the heaters! Full on. This place feels like a frig after this window being open so long. Carreras will be here any minute and it’s the first thing he’ll notice. After that, towels for me. Doc, a hand to get MacDonald back to his own bed. Move, man, move! And why aren’t you and Susan dressed for bed? If Carreras sees you——”
“We were expecting the gentleman to come calling with a gun,” MacDonald reminded me. “You’re frozen stiff, Mr. Carter, blue with cold. And shivering like you were in an icebox.”
“I feel like it.” We dumped MacDonald, none too gently, on his bed, pulled up sheets and blankets, then I tore off my clothes and started to towel myself dry. No matter how I towelled, I couldn’t stop the shivering.
“The key,” MacDonald said sharply. “The key in the sick-bay door.”
“God, yes!” I’d forgotten all about it. “Susan, will you? Unlock it. And then to bed. Quickly! And you, Doctor.” I took the key from her, opened the window behind the curtain and flung the key out: the suit I had been wearing, the socks, the wet towels following in short order, but not before I had remembered to remove the screwdriver and MacDonald’s clasp-knife from the jacket. I dried and combed my hair into some sort of order—as orderly as anyone could expect it to be after a few hours sleeping in bed—and helped Doc Marston as he swiftly changed the plaster on my head and wrapped splints and fresh bandages round the still soaking ones covering the wounds in my leg. Then the lights clicked off and the sick-bay was once more in darkness.
“Have I forgotten anything, anybody?” I asked. “Anything that might show I’ve been out of here?”
“Nothing, I don’t think there’s anything.” The bo’sun speaking. “I’m sure.”
“The heaters?” I asked. “Are they on? It’s freezing in here.”
“It’s not that cold, my boy,” Bullen said in his husky whisper “You’re freezing, that’s what. Marston, haven’t you—?”
“Hot-water bags,” Marston said briskly. “Two of them Here they are.” He thrust them into my hands in the dark.
“Had them all prepared for you, we suspected all that sea water and rain wouldn’t do that fever of yours any good. And here’s a glass to show your friend Carreras a few drops of brandy in the bottom to convince him how far through you are.”
“You might have filled it,” I complained.
“I did.”
I emptied it. No question but that that neat brandy had a heating effect, it seemed to burn a hole through me all the way down to my stomach: but the only overall effect it had was to make the rest of me seem colder than ever.
Then MacDonald’s voice, quick and quiet: “Someone coming.”
I’d time to fumble the empty glass on to the bedside table, but time for nothing more, not even time to slide down to a lying position under the blankets. The door opened, the overhead lights clicked on and Carreras, the inevitable chart under his arm, advanced across the sick-bay towards my bed. As usual, he had his expressions and emotions under complete control: anxiety, tension, anticipation, all those must have been in his mind, and behind everything the memory of his lost son: but no trace showed.
He stopped a yard away and stared down at me, eyes speculative and narrowed and cold.
“Not asleep, Carter, eh?” he said slowly. “Not even lying down.” He picked up the glass from the bedside table, sniffed it and set it down again. “Brandy. And you’re shivering, Carter. Shivering all the time. Why? Answer me!”
“I’m frightened,” I said sourly. “Every time I see you I get terrified.”
“Mr. Carreras!” Doc Marston had just appeared through the dispensary doorway, a blanket wrapped round him, his magnificent mane of white hair tousled in splendid disorder, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “This is outrageous, completely outrageous. Disturbing this very sick boy—and at this hour. I must ask you to leave, sir. And at once!”
Carreras looked him over from head to toe and back again, then said quietly and coldly: “Be quiet.”
“I will not be quiet!” Doc Marston shouted. M.G.M. would have given him a life-contract any day. “I’m a doctor, I’ve my duty as a doctor and, by God, I’m going to have my say as a doctor!” There was unfortunately no table at hand otherwise he would have crashed down his fist on it, but even without the table-banging it was a pretty impressive performance and Carreras was obviously taken aback by Marston’s professional ire and outrage.
“Chief Officer Carter is a very sick man,” Marston thundered on. “I haven’t the facilities here to treat a compound fracture of the femur and the result was inevitable. Pneumonia, sir, pneumonia! In both lungs, so much fluid gathered already that he can’t lie down, he can hardly breathe. Temperature 104, pulse 130, high fever, constant shivering. I’ve packed him with hot-water bottles, fed him drugs, aspirin, brandy, all to no effect. Fever just won’t go down: one moment burning hot, the next soaking wet.” He was right about the soaking wet bit, anyway, I could feel the sea-water from the sodden bandages seeping through to the mattress below. “For God’s sake, Carreras, can’t you see he’s a sick man? Leave him be.”
“I’ll only keep him a moment, Doctor,” Carreras said soothingly. Whatever faint stirrings of suspicion he might have had had been completely laid to rest by Marston’s Oscar-winning performance. “I can see that Mr. Carter is unwell. But this will give him no trouble at all.”
I was reaching for the chart and pencil even before he handed it to me. What with the constant shivering and the numbness that seemed to be spreading from my injured leg over my entire body, the calculations took me longer than usual, but they weren’t difficult. I looked at the sick-bay clock and said: “You should be in position shortly before 4 a.m.”
“We can’t miss him, you would say, Mr. Carter?” He wasn’t as confident and unworried as he looked. “Even in the dark?”
“With the radar going I don’t see how you can.” I wheezed some more so that he wouldn’t forget to remember how sick I was, and went on: “How do you propose to make the Ticonderoga stop?” I was as anxious as he was that contact should be established and transfers accomplished as quickly and smoothly as possible. The Twister in the hold was due to blow up at 7 a.m.: I’d just as soon be a long distance away by that time.
“A shell across the bows and a signal to stop. If that doesn’t work,” he added reflectively, “a shell through the fo’c’sle.”
“You really do surprise me, Carreras,” I said slowly.
“Surprise you?” A barely perceptible lift of the left eyebrow, for Carreras a perfect riot of expression. “How so?”
“A man who has taken such infinite pains and, I must admit, shown such superb planning throughout—to throw it all away by such careless haphazard action at the end.” He made to speak, but I held up my hand and carried on: “I’m just as interested as you are in seeing that the Fort Ticonderoga is stopped. I don’t give a tuppenny damn about the gold. I do know it’s essential that Captain Bullen, the bo’sun and I get to a first-class hospital immediately. I do want to see all the passengers and crew transferred to safety. I don’t want to see any members of the Ticonderoga’s crew killed by gunfire. And finally——”
“Get on with it,�
�� he interrupted coldly.
“Right. You intercept at five. In the present weather conditions it’ll be half light then—light enough to let the master of the Fort Ticonderoga see you approaching. When he sees another vessel closing in on him—with the whole width of the Atlantic to use to pass him by—he’ll become immediately suspicious. After all, he knows he’s carrying a fortune in gold. He’ll turn and run for it. In the half light, with poor visibility, falling rain, pitching decks and a gun-crew almost certainly untrained in naval gunnery, your chances of registering a hit on the small target presented by a target running away from you are pretty small. Not that that pop-gun I’m told you’ve mounted on the fo’c’sle will achieve very much anyway.”
“No one could call the gun I have mounted on the after-deck a pop-gun, Mr. Carter.” But for all the untroubled smoothness of the face, he was thinking plenty. “It’s almost the equivalent of a 3.7.”
“So what? You’ll have to turn broadside on to bring that one to bear, and while you’re turning the Ticonderoga will be getting even farther away from you. For the reasons already given, you’ll almost certainly miss anyway. After the second shot, those deck-plates will probably be buckled to hell and gone. Then how do you propose to stop him? You can’t make a 14,000-ton cargo ship stop just by waving a few tommy-guns at it.”
“It will not come to that. There is an element of uncertainty in everything. But we shall not fail.”
“There’s no need for any element of uncertainty, Carreras.”
“Indeed? How do you propose it should be done?”
“I think that’s enough!” It was Captain Bullen who broke in, his husky voice heavy with all the weight and authority of the commodore of the Blue Mail. “Doing chart-work under pressure is one thing: voluntarily scheming to further this criminal’s plans is another. I have listened to all of this. Haven’t you gone far enough, Mister?”
“Hell, no,” I said. “I won’t have gone far enough till all of us have gone all the way to the Navy Hospital in Hampton Roads. The thing’s dead simple, Carreras. When he comes within a few miles on the radar scope, start firing off distress signals. At the same time—you’d better arrange this now—have your stooges on the Ticonderoga take a message to the master saying they’ve just picked up SOS signals from the Campari. When he comes nearer, send an Aldis message that you sprung engine-room plates coming through the hurricane, which he’s bound to have heard of.” I smiled my wan smile. “The last part is true anyway. When he’s stopped alongside and you whip the tarpaulins off your guns—well, you have him. He can’t and won’t dare to try to get away.”
He stared at me without seeing me, then gave a small nod.
“I suppose it’s out of the question to persuade you to become my—all—lieutenant, Carter?”
“Just see me safe aboard the Ticonderoga, Carreras. That’s all the thanks I want.”
“That shall be done.” He glanced at his watch. “In under three hours six of your crew will be here with stretchers to transfer Captain Bullen, the bo’sun and yourself to the Ticonderoga.”
He left. I looked round the sick-bay, they were all there, Bullen and MacDonald in their beds, Susan and Marston by the dispensary door, both shawled in blankets. They were all looking at me and the expressions on their faces were very peculiar indeed, to say the least of it.
The silence went on and on for what seemed like a quite unnecessarily long time, then Bullen spoke, his voice slow and hard.
“Carreras has committed one act of piracy: he is about to commit another. By doing so he declares himself an enemy of Queen and country. You will be charged with giving aid and comfort to the enemy, with being directly responsible for the loss of 150 million dollars in gold bullion. I shall take statements from witnesses present as soon as we get aboard the Ticonderoga.” I couldn’t blame the old man, he still believed in Carreras’s promise as to our future safety. In his eyes, I was just making things too damned easy for Carreras. But now wasn’t the time to enlighten him.
“Oh, here,” I said, “that’s a bit hard, isn’t it? Aiding, abetting, accessorying, if you like, but all this treason stuff——”
“Why did you do it?” Susan Beresford shook her head wonderingly. “Oh, why did you do it? Helping him like that just to save your own neck.” And now wasn’t the time to enlighten her either: neither she nor Bullen were actor enough to carry off their parts in the morning if they knew the whole truth.
“That’s a bit hard, too,” I protested. “Only a few hours ago there was no one keener than yourself to get away from the Campari. And now that——”
“I didn’t want it done this way! I didn’t know until now that there was a good chance that the Ticonderoga could escape.”
“I wouldn’t have believed it, John,” Dr. Marston said heavily. “I just wouldn’t have believed it.”
“It’s all right for all of you to talk,” I said. “You’ve all got families. I’ve only got myself. Can you blame me for wanting to took after all I have?”
No one took me up on this masterpiece of logical reasoning. I looked round them one by one and they turned away one by one, Susan, Marston and Bullen, not bothering to hide their expressions. And then MacDonald, too, turned away, but not before his left eyelid had dropped in a long slow wink.
I eased myself down in bed and made up my mind for sleep. No one asked me how I had got on that night.
XII.
Saturday 6 a.m.—7 a.m.
When I awoke I was stiff and sore and still shivering. But it wasn’t the pain or the cold or the fever that had brought me up from the murky depths of that troubled sleep. It was noise, a series of grinding, creaking metallic crashes that echoed and shuddered throughout the entire length of the Campari as if she were smashing into an iceberg with every roll she took. I could tell from the slow, sluggish, lifeless roll that the stabilisers weren’t working: the Campari was stopped dead in the water.
“Well, Mister.” Bullen’s voice was a harsh grate. “Your plan worked, damn you. Congratulations. The Ticonderoga’s alongside.”
“Right alongside,” MacDonald confirmed. “Lashed alongside.”
“In this weather?” I winced as the two ships rolled heavily together in the trough of a deep swell, and I heard the harsh tearing scream of sound as topsides metal buckled and rended under the staggering weight of the impact. “It’ll ruin the paintwork. The man’s mad.”
“He’s in a hurry,” MacDonald said. “I can hear the jumbo winch aft. He’s started trans-shipping cargo already.”
“Aft?” I couldn’t keep the note of excitement out of my voice, and everybody suddenly looked at me, curiosity in their eyes. “Aft? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, sir.”
“Are we tied bow to bow and stern to stern or are we facing in opposite directions?”
“No idea.” Both he and Bullen were giving me very close looks, but there was a difference in the quality of the closeness. “Does it matter, Mr. Carter?” He knew damned well it did.
“It didn’t matter,” I said indifferently. Not much it didn’t matter: only 150 million dollars, that was all it mattered.
“Where’s Miss Beresford?” I asked Marston.
“With her folks,” he said shortly. “Packing clothes. Your kind friend Carreras is allowing the passengers to take one suitcase apiece with them. He says they’ll get the rest of their stuff back in due course—if anyone manages to pick up the Campari after he has abandoned it, that is.”
It was typical, I thought, of the man’s extraordinary thoroughness in all he did: by letting them pack some clothes and promising the eventual safe return of the remainder, he would eliminate from even the most suspicious mind the unworthy thought that perhaps his intentions towards the crew and passengers weren’t of the highest and noblest.
The phone rang. Marston picked it up, listened briefly, then hung up.
“Stretcher party in five minutes,” he announced.
“Help me dress, please,
” I said. “My white uniform shorts and white shirt.”
“You—you’re not getting up?” Marston was aghast.
“What if——”
“I’m getting up, dressing and getting back to bed again,” I said shortly. “Do you think I’m daft? What’s Carreras going to think if he sees a man with a compound fracture of the thigh hopping briskly over the rail on to the Ticonderoga”
I dressed, stuck the screwdriver under the splints on my left leg and got back to bed again. I was no sooner there than the stretcher party appeared and all three of us, still blanket-wrapped were lowered gently on to the stretchers. The six bearers stooped, caught the handles and we were on our way.
We were carried straight aft along the main deck passage to the after-deck. I saw the end of the passage approaching, the grey cold dawn light replacing the warm electric glow of the passageway, and I could feel my muscles tense involuntarily. The Ticonderoga would be in sight in a few seconds along our starboard side and I wondered if I would dare to look. Would we be tied bow to bow or bow to stern? Would I have won or lost? We came out on the after-deck. I forced myself to look.
I’d won. Bow to bow and stern to stern. From my low elevation on the stretcher I couldn’t see much, but that I could see—bow to bow, stern to stern. That meant that the Campari’s after jumbo was unloading from the Ticonderoga’s after-deck. I looked again and checked again and there was no mistake. Bow to bow, stern to stern. I felt like a million dollars, A hundred million dollars.
The Ticonderoga, a big cargo vessel, dark blue with a red funnel, was almost the same size as the Campari. More important, their after-decks were almost the same height above the water, which made for ease of transfer of both cargo and human beings. I could count eight crates already aboard the after-deck of the Campari: a dozen still to come.
The Golden Rendezvous Page 26