Bear Island

by Alistair MacLean

  The Count sat in silence for some moments, his face not giving anything away, then he said: ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I never for a moment thought you would.’ I tapped the bulky pocket of his anorak ‘That’s where it should be, not lying about uselessly in your cabin.’

  ‘What, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Your 9 mm Beretta automatic.’

  I left the Count on this suitably enigmatic note and moved across to where Lonnie was making hay while the sun shone. The hand that held his glass shook with an almost constant tremor and his eyes were glassy but his speech was as intelligible and lucid as ever.

  ‘And once again our medical Lochinvar or was it Launcelot gallops forth to the rescue,’ Lonnie intoned. ‘I can’t tell you, my dear boy, how my heart fills with pride—’

  ‘Stay inside when I’m gone, Lonnie. Don’t go beyond that door. Not once. Please. For me.’

  ‘Merciful heavens!’ Lonnie hiccoughed on a grand scale. ‘One would think I am in danger.’

  ‘You are. Believe me, you are.’

  ‘Me? Me?’ He was genuinely baffled. ‘And who would wish ill to poor old harmless Lonnie?’

  ‘You’d be astonished at the people who would wish ill to poor old harmless Lonnie. Dispensing for the moment with your homilies about the innate kindness of human nature, will you promise me, really promise me, that you won’t go out tonight?’

  ‘This is so important to you, then, my boy?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Very well. With this gnarled hand on a vat of the choicest malt—’

  I left him to get on with what promised to be a very lengthy promise indeed and approached Conrad and Mary Stuart who seemed to be engaged in an argument that was as low-pitched as it was intense. They broke off and Mary Stuart put a beseeching hand on my arm. She said: ‘Please, Dr Marlowe. Please tell Charles not to go. He’ll listen to you, I know he will.’ She shivered. ‘I just know that something awful is going to happen tonight.’

  ‘You may well be right at that,’ I said. ‘Mr Conrad, you are not expendable.’

  I could, I immediately realized, have lighted upon a more fortunate turn of phrase. Instead of looking at Conrad she kept looking at me and the implications of what I’d said dawned on me quite some time after they had clearly dawned on her. She put both hands on my arm, looked at me with dull and hopeless eyes, then turned and walked towards her cubicle.

  ‘Go after her,’ I said to Conrad. ‘Tell her—’

  ‘No point. I’m going. She knows it.’

  ‘Go after her and tell her to open her window and put that black box I gave her on the snow outside. Then close her window.’

  Conrad looked at me closely, made as if to speak, then left. He was nobody’s fool, he hadn’t even given a nod that could have been interpreted as acknowledgment.

  He was back within a minute. We pulled on all the outer clothes we could and furnished ourselves with four of the largest torches. On the way to the door, Mary Darling rose from where she was sitting beside a still badly battered Allen. ‘Dr Marlowe.’

  I put my head to where I figured her ear lay behind the tangled platinum hair and whispered: ‘I’m wonderful?’

  She nodded solemnly, eyes sad behind the huge horn-rimmed glasses, and kissed me. I didn’t know what the audience thought of this little vignette and didn’t much care: probably a last tender farewell to the good doctor before he moved out forever into the outer darkness. As the door closed behind us, Conrad said complainingly: ‘She might have kissed me too.’

  ‘I think you’ve done pretty well already,’ I said. He had the grace to keep silent. With our torches off we moved across to what shelter was offered from the now quite heavily falling snow by the provisions hut and remained there for two or three minutes until we were quite certain that no one had it in mind to follow us. Then we moved round the side of the main cabin and picked up the black box outside Mary Stuart’s window. She was standing there and I’m quite sure she saw us but she made no gesture or any attempt to wave goodbye: it seemed as if the two Marys had but one thought in common.

  We made our way through the snow and the darkness down to the jetty, stowed the black box securely under the stern-sheets, started up the outboard—51/2 horsepower only, but enough for a fourteen-footer—and cast off. As we came round the northern arm of the jetty Conrad said: ‘Christ, it’s as black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat. How do you propose to set about it?’

  ‘Set about what?’

  ‘Finding Heissman and company, of course.’

  ‘I couldn’t care if I never saw that lot again,’ I said candidly. ‘I’ve no intention of trying to find them. On the contrary, all our best efforts are going to be brought to bear to avoid them.’ While Conrad was silently mulling over this volte-face, I took the boat, the motor throttle right back for prudence’s sake, just over a hundred yards out until we were close into the northern shore of the Sor-hamna and cut the engine. As the boat drifted to a stop I went for’ard and eased anchor and rope over the side.

  ‘According to the chart,’ I said, ‘there are three fathoms here. According to the experts, that should mean about fifty feet of rope to prevent us from drifting. So, fifty feet. And as we’re against the land and so can’t be silhouetted, that should make us practically invisible to anyone approaching from the south. No smoking, of course.’

  ‘Very funny,’ Conrad said. Then, after a pause, he went on carefully: ‘Who are you expecting to approach from the south?’

  ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’

  ‘All right, all right. So you don’t think there’s anything wrong with them?’

  ‘I think there’s a great deal wrong with them, but not in the sense you mean.’

  ‘Ah!’ There was a silence which I took to be a very thoughtful one on his part. ‘Speaking of Snow White.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How about whiling away the time by telling me a fairy story?’

  So I told everything I knew or thought I knew and he listened in complete silence throughout. When I finished I waited for comment but none came, so I said: ‘I have your promise that you won’t clobber Heissman on sight?’

  ‘Reluctantly given, reluctantly given.’ He shivered. ‘Jesus, it’s cold.’

  ‘It will be. Listen.’

  At first faintly, intermittently, through the falling snow and against the northerly wind, came the sound of an engine, closing: within two minutes the exhaust beat was sharp and distinct. Conrad said: ‘Well, would you believe it. They got their motor fixed.’

  We remained quietly where we were, bobbing gently at anchor and shivering in the deepening cold, as Heissman’s boat rounded the northern arm of the jetty and cut its engine. Heissman, Goin and Jungbeck didn’t just tie up and go ashore immediately, they remained by the jetty for over ten minutes. It was impossible to see what they were doing, the darkness and the snow made it impossible to see even the most shadowy outlines of their forms, but several times we could see the flickering of torch beams behind the jetty arm, several times I heard distinctly metallic thuds and twice I imagined I heard the splash of something heavy entering the water. Finally, we saw three pin-points of light move along the main arm of the jetty and disappear in the direction of the cabin.

  Conrad said: ‘I suppose, at this stage, I should have some intelligent questions to ask.’

  ‘And I should have some intelligent answers. I think we’ll have them soon. Get that anchor in, will you?’

  I started up the outboard again and, keeping it at its lowest revolutions, moved eastwards for another two hundred yards, then turned south until, calculating that the combination of distance and the northerly wind had taken us safely out of earshot of the cabin, I judged the moment had come to open the throttle to its maximum.

  Navigating, if that was the word for it, was easier than I had thought it would be. We’d been out more than long enough now to achieve the maximum in night-sight
and I had little difficulty in making out the coastline to my right: even on a darker night than this it would have been difficult not to distinguish the sharp demarcation line between the blackness of the cliffs and the snow- covered hills stretching away beyond them. Neither was the sea as rough as I had feared it might be: choppy, but no more than that, the wind could hardly have lain in a more favourable quarter than it did that night.

  Kapp Malmgren came up close on the starboard hand and I turned the boat more to the southwest to move into the Evjebukta, but not too much, for although the cliffs were easily enough discernible, objects low in the water and lying against their black background were virtually undetectable and I had no wish to run the boat on to the islands that I had observed that morning in the northern part of the bay.

  For the first time since we’d weighed anchor Conrad spoke. He was possessed of an exemplary patience. Clearing his throat, he said: ‘Is one permitted to ask a question?’

  ‘You’re even permitted to receive an answer. Remember those extraordinary stacks and pinnacles close by the cliffs when we were rounding the south of the island in the Morning Rose?’

  ‘Oh blessed memory,’ Conrad said yearningly.

  ‘No need for heartbreak,’ I said encouragingly. ‘You’ll be seeing her again tonight.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘The Morning Rose?’

  ‘None other. That is to say, I hope. But later. Those stacks were caused by erosion, which in turn was caused by tidal streams, storm waves and frost—island used to be much bigger than it is now, bits of it are falling into the sea all the time. This same erosion also caused caves to form in the cliffs. But it formed something else—I knew nothing about it until this afternoon—which I think must be unique in the world. Two or three hundred yards in from the southern tip of this bay, a promontory called Kapp Kolthoff, is a tiny horseshoe-shaped harbour—I saw it through the binoculars this morning.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘I was out for a walk. At the inner end of this harbour there is an opening, not just any opening, but a tunnel that goes clear through to the other side of Kapp Kolthoff. It must be at least two hundred yards in length. It’s called Perleporten. You have to have a large-scale map of Bear Island to find it. I got my hands on a large-scale map this afternoon.’

  ‘That length? Straight through? It must be man-made.’

  ‘Who the hell would spend a fortune tunnelling through two hundred yards of rock from A to B, when you can sail from A to B in five minutes? I mean, in Bear Island?’

  ‘It’s not very likely,’ Conrad said. ‘And you think Heissman and his friends may have been here?’

  ‘I don’t know where else they could have been. I looked every place I could look this morning in the Sor-hamna and in this bay. Nothing.’

  Conrad said nothing, which was one of the things I liked about a man whom I was beginning to like very much. He could have asked a dozen questions to which there were as yet no answers, but because he knew there were none he refrained from asking them. The Evinrude kept purring along with reassuring steadiness and in about ten minutes I could see the outline of the cliffs on the south of the Evjebukta looming up. To the left, the tip of Kapp Kolthoff was clearly to be seen. I imagined I could see white breakers beyond.

  ‘There can’t possibly be anyone to see us,’ I said, ‘and we don’t need our night-sight any more. I know there are no islands in the vicinity. Headlamps would be handy.’

  Conrad moved up into the bows and switched on two of our powerful torches. Within two minutes I could see the sheer of dripping black cliffs less than a hundred yards ahead. I turned to starboard and paralleled the cliffs to the north-west. One minute later we had it—the eastward facing entrance to a tiny circular inlet. I throttled the motor right back and moved gingerly inside and almost at once we had it—a small semi-circular opening at the base of the south cliff. It seemed impossibly small. We drifted towards it at less than one knot. Conrad looked back over his shoulder.

  ‘I’m claustrophobic’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘If we get stuck?’

  ‘The sixteen-footer is bigger than this one.’

  ‘If it was here. Ah, well, in for a penny, in for a pound.’

  I crossed my mental fingers that Conrad would have cause to remember those words and eased the boat into the tunnel. It was bigger than it looked but not all that bigger. The waves and waters of countless æons had worn the rock walls as smooth as alabaster. Although it held a remarkably true direction almost due south it was clear, because of the varying widths and the varying heights of the tunnel roof, that the hand of man had never been near the Perleporten; then, suddenly, when Conrad called out and pointed ahead and to the right, that wasn’t so clear any more.

  The opening in the wall, no more, really, than an indentation hardly distinguishable from one or two already passed, was, at its deepest, no more than six feet, but it was bounded by an odd flat shelf that varied from two to five feet in width. It looked as if it had been man-made, but then, there were so many curiously shaped rock formations in those parts that it might just possibly have resulted from natural causes. But there was one thing about that place that absolutely was in no way due to natural causes: a pile of grey-painted metal bars, neatly stacked in criss-cross symmetry.

  Neither of us spoke. Conrad switched on the other two torches, pivoted their heads until they were facing upwards, and placed them all on the shelf, flooding the tiny area with light. Not without some difficulty we scrambled on to the shelf and looped the painter round one of the bars. Still without speaking I took the boat-hook and probed the bottom: it was less than five feet below the surface, and a very odd kind of rock it felt too. I guddled around some more, let the hook strike something at once hard and yielding and hauled it up. It was a half-inch chain, corroded in places, but still sound. I hauled some more and the end of another rectangular bar, identical in size to those on the shelf and secured to the chain by an eye-bolt, came into sight. It was badly discoloured. I lowered chain and bar back to the bottom.

  Still in this uncanny silence I took a knife from my pocket and tested the surface of one of the bars. The metal, almost certainly lead, was soft and yielding, but it was no more than a covering skin, there was something harder beneath. I dug the knifeblade in hard and scraped away an inch of the lead. Something yellow glittered in the lamp-light.

  ‘Well, now,’ Conrad said. ‘Jackpot, I believe, is the technical term.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And look at this.’ Conrad reached behind the pile of bars and brought up a can of paint. It was labelled ‘Instant Grey’.

  ‘It seems to be very good stuff,’ I said. I touched one of the bars. ‘Quite dry. And, you must admit, quite clever. You saw off the eye-bolt, paint the whole lot over, and what do you have?’

  ‘A ballast bar identical in size and colour to the ballast bars in the mock-up sub.’

  ‘Ten out of ten,’ I said. I hefted one of the bars. ‘Just right for easy handling. A forty-pound ingot.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s my Treasury training. Current value—say thirty thousand dollars. How many bars in that pile, would you say?’

  ‘A hundred. More.’

  ‘And that’s just for starters. Bulk is almost certainly still under water. Paint-brushes there?’

  ‘Yes.’ Conrad reached behind the pile but I checked him.

  ‘Please not,’ I said. ‘Think of all those lovely fingerprints.’

  Conrad said slowly: ‘My mind’s just engaged gear again.’ He looked at the pile and said incredulously: ‘Three million dollars?’

  ‘Give or take a few per cent.’

  ‘I think we’d better leave,’ Conrad said. ‘I’m coming all over avaricious.’

  We left. As we emerged into the little circular bay we both looked back at the dark and menacing little tunnel. Conrad said: ‘Who discovered this?’


  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Perleporten. What does that mean?’

  ‘The gates of Pearl.’

  ‘They came pretty close at that.’

  ‘It wasn’t a bad try.’ The journey back was a great deal more unpleasant than the outward one had been, the seas were against us, the icy wind and the equally icy snow were in our faces, and because of the same snow the visibility was drastically reduced. But we made it inside an hour. Almost literally frozen stiff but at the same time contradictorily shaking with the cold, we tied the boat up. Conrad clambered up on to the jetty. I passed him the black box, cut about thirty feet off the boat’s anchor rope and followed. I built a rope cradle round the box, fumbled with a pair of catches and opened a hinged cover section which comprised a third of the top plate and two-thirds of a side plate. In the near total darkness switches and dials were less than half-seen blurs, but I didn’t need light to operate this instrument, which was a basically very simple affair anyway. I pulled out a manually operated telescopic aerial to its fullest extent and turned two switches. A dim green light glowed and a faint hum, that couldn’t have been heard a yard away, came from the box.

  ‘I always think it’s so satisfactory when those little toys work,’ Conrad said. ‘But won’t the snow gum up the works?’

  ‘This little toy costs just over a thousand pounds. You can immerse it in acid, you can boil it in water, you can drop it from a four-storey building. It still works. It’s got a little sister that can be fired from a naval gun. I don’t think a little snow will harm, do you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so.’ He watched in silence as I lowered the box, pilot light facing the stonework, over the south arm of the pier, secured the rope to a bollard, made it fast round its base and concealed it with a scattering of snow. ‘What’s the range?’

  ‘Forty miles. It won’t require a quarter of that tonight’

  ‘And it’s transmitting now?’

  ‘It’s transmitting now.’

  We moved back to the main arm of the pier, brushing footmarks away with our gloves. I said: ‘I wouldn’t think they would have heard us coming back, but no chances. A weather eye, if you please.’