The Dark Crusader

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Send one of your men there, please. Tell your C.O. – what’s his name, by the way?’

  ‘Captain Griffiths.’

  ‘Tell Captain Griffiths than an attempt will almost certainly be made to overpower you and seize your installation very shortly, perhaps in only an hour or two,’ I said quickly. ‘Professor Witherspoon and his assistants who worked on the archaeological excavations on the other side of the island have been murdered by criminals who have driven –’

  ‘Murdered!’ He came close to me. ‘Did you say murdered?’

  ‘Let me finish. They’ve driven this tunnel clear through the island and need breach only a few more feet of limestone to emerge on this side of the island. Where, I don’t know, probably about a hundred feet above sea-level. You’ll need patrols, patrols to listen for their picks and shovels. They’re unlikely to blast their way out.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘I know. How many men have you here?’

  ‘Eighteen civilian, the rest Navy. About fifty all told.’

  ‘Armed?’

  ‘Rifles, tommy-guns, about a dozen altogether. Look here, Mr – ah – Bentall, are you absolutely certain about – I mean, how am I to know – ?’

  ‘I’m sure. For heaven’s sake, man, hurry!’

  Another momentary hesitation, then he turned to one of the half-seen men by his side. ‘Did you get that, Johnston?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Witherspoon and others dead. Attack expected through tunnel, very soon. Patrols, listening. Yes, sir.’

  ‘Right. Off you go.’ Johnston disappeared at a dead run, and Anderson turned to me. ‘I suggest we go straight to the captain. You will forgive me if Leading Seaman Allison walks behind us. You have made an illegal entry into an officially protected area and I can’t take chances. Not till I have clear proof of your bona fides. ’

  ‘Just so long as he keeps his safety catch on I don’t care what he does,’ I said wearily. ‘I haven’t come all this length just to be shot in the back if your man trips over his own ankles.’

  We went off in single file, not talking, Anderson with a torch leading the way and Allison with another bringing up the rear. I was feeling dizzy and unwell. The first greyish streaks of dawn were beginning to finger their way upwards from the eastern horizon. After we had gone perhaps three hundred yards, following an ill-defined track that ran first through a scrubby belt of palms and then low bush, I heard an exclamation from the sailor behind me.

  He came up close to my back, then called out: ‘Sir!’

  Anderson stopped, turned. ‘What is it, Allison?’

  ‘This man’s hurt, sir. Badly hurt, I should say. Look at his left arm.’

  We all looked at my left arm, no one with more interest than myself. Despite my attempts to favour it as we had been swimming, the exertion seemed to have opened up the major wounds again and my left hand was completely covered with blood that had dripped down my arm. The spreading effect of the intermingled salt water made it seem worse than it actually was, but even so it was more than enough to account for the way I felt.

  Sub-Lieutenant Anderson went far up in my estimation. He spent no time on exclamations or sympathies, but said: ‘Mind if I rip this sleeve off?;

  ‘Go ahead.’ I said. ‘But mind you don’t rip off the arm at the same time. I don’t think there’s a great deal holding it in place.’

  They cut off the sleeve with the aid of Allison’s knife and I could see the tightening of Anderson’s thin brown intelligent face as he studied the wounds.

  ‘Your friends at the phosphate camp?’

  ‘That’s it. They had a dog.’

  ‘This is either infected or gangrenous or both. Either way it’s pretty nasty. Lucky for you we have a naval surgeon here. Hold this, miss, will you?’ He handed his torch to Marie, pulled off his shirt and tore it into several wide strips, using them to bandage my arm tightly. ‘Won’t do the infection any good, but it should cut down the bleeding. The civilian Quonset huts aren’t any more than half a mile from here. Think you can make it?’ The reserved tone in the voice had vanished: the sight of that left arm had been as good as a character reference from the First Sea Lord.

  ‘I can make it. It’s not all that bad.’

  Ten minutes later a long low building with a Nissen type roof loomed up out of the greying dark. Anderson knocked at a door, walked in and touched a switch that lit up a couple of overhead lights.

  It was a long bare barn-like structure of a place, with the first third of it given over to a kind of communal living-centre while beyond that a narrow central passage bisected two rows of eight by eight cubicles, each with its own door, all of them open to the main roof. In the foreground, brown Corticene on the floor, a couple of small tables with writing materials, seven or eight rattan and canvas chairs and that was it. No home from home, but good enough for something that would only be left there to rust and flake away when the Navy was finished with it.

  Anderson nodded to a chair and I didn’t need any second invitation. He crossed to a small alcove, picked up a phone I hadn’t noticed and cranked a naval-type generator. He listened for a few minutes, then hung it back on its rest.

  ‘Damn thing’s gone dead,’ he said irritably. ‘Always when you need it most. Sorry, Allison, more walking for you. My apologies to Surgeon-Lieutenant Brookman. Ask him to bring his kit. Tell him why. And tell the captain we’ll be over as soon as possible.’

  Allison left. I looked at Marie, seated across the table from me, and I smiled back. The first impression of Anderson had been a wrong one, if only they were all as efficient as he was. The temptation to relax, to let go and close the eyes, was temptation indeed: but I’d only to think of those still prisoners in the hands of Witherspoon and Hewell and I didn’t feel sleepy any more.

  The door of the nearest cubicle on the left opened and a tall skinny youngish man, with prematurely grey hair and a pair of horn-rimmed pebble glasses, clad only in a pair of undershorts, came out into the passage, glasses raised halfway up his forehead as he rubbed the sleep out of myopic eyes. He caught sight of Anderson, opened his mouth to speak, caught sight of Marie, dropped his jaw in astonishment, gave a peculiar kind of yelp and hurriedly retreated.

  He wasn’t the only one who was astonished; compared to my own reactions he was a selling-plater in the jaw-dropping field. I rose slowly to my feet, propping myself up on the table, Bentall giving his incomparable impression of a man who has seen a ghost. I was still giving the impression when the man appeared a few seconds later, dressing-gown flapping about his lanky ankles, and this time the first person he saw was me. He stopped short, peered at me with his head out-thrust at the end of a long thin neck, then walked slowly to where I was standing.

  ‘John Bentall?’ He reached out to touch my right shoulder, maybe to make sure I was real. ‘Johnny Bentall!’

  I’d got my jaw closed far enough to speak.

  ‘No other. Bentall it is. I didn’t exactly look to find you here, Dr Hargreaves.’ The last time I’d seen him had been over a year previously, when he’d been the chief of hypersonics in the Hepworth Ordinance establishment.

  ‘And the young lady?’ Even in moments of stress Hargreaves had always been the most punctilious of men. ‘Your wife, Bentall?’

  ‘Off and on.’ I said. ‘Marie Hopeman, ex-Mrs Bentall. I’ll explain later. What are you – ?’

  ‘Your shoulder!’ he said sharply. ‘Your arm. You’ve hurt it.’

  I refrained from telling him that I knew all about my arm.

  ‘A dog bit me,’ I said patiently. It didn’t sound right, somehow. ‘I’ll tell you all you want, but, first, one or two things. Quickly, please. It’s important. Are you working here, Dr Hargreaves?’

  ‘Of course I am.’ He answered the question as if he considered it mildly half-witted and from his point of view I suppose it was. He would be unlikely to be taking a holiday in a naval camp in the South Pacific.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Doing what
?’ He paused and peered at me through his pebbles. ‘I’m not sure whether I –’

  ‘Mr Bentall says he is a Government Intelligence officer,’ Anderson put in quietly. ‘I believe him.’

  ‘Government? Intelligence?’ Dr Hargreaves was in a repetitive mood to-night. He looked at me suspiciously. ‘You must forgive me if I’m a bit confused, Bentall. What happened to that machine import-export business you inherited from your uncle a year or so ago?’

  ‘Nothing. It never existed. There had to be some cover-up story to account for my departure. I’m betraying official secrets but not really doing any harm in telling you that I was seconded to a government agency to investigate the leakage of information about the new solid fuels we were working on at the time.’

  ‘Um.’ He thought a bit, then made up his mind. ‘Solid fuel, eh? That’s why we’re out here. Testing the stuff. Very secret and all that, you know.’

  ‘A new type rocket?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘It had to be that. You don’t have to take off to the middle of nowhere to carry out experiments on new stuff unless it’s either explosives or rockets. And heavens knows we’ve reached the limit in explosives without blowing ourselves into space.’

  By this time other cubicle doors had opened and a variety of sleepy men, in a variety of clothes and underclothes, were peering out to see what the matter was. Anderson went and spoke softly to them, knocked on a couple of other doors, then came back and smiled apologetically.

  ‘Might as well have them all here, Mr Bentall. If your facts are right it’s time they were up and away: and it’ll save you having to tell the same story over again.’

  ‘Thanks, Lieutenant.’ I sat down again and closed grateful fingers over a large glass of whisky that had mysteriously appeared from nowhere. Two or three tentative sips and the room seemed to be floating around me, neither my thoughts nor my eyes were any too keen to be focused on anything, but after another few sips my vision seemed to clear again and the pain in my arm began to recede. I supposed I was getting light-headed.

  ‘Well, come on, Bentall,’ Hargreaves said impatiently. ‘We’re waiting.’

  I looked up. They were waiting. Seven of them altogether, not counting Anderson – and the late Dr Fairfield was the missing eighth.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep it short. But, first, I wonder if any of you gentlemen have any spare clothes. Miss Hopeman here has just recovered from a rather bad chill and fever and I’m afraid –’

  This gave me another minute’s grace and time for the glass to be emptied and refilled by Anderson. The competition to supply Marie with clothes was brisk. When she’d given me a grateful and rather tired smile and disappeared into one of the cubicles, I told them the story in two minutes, quickly, concisely, missing out nothing but the fact that I’d heard women singing in the abandoned mine. When I’d finished, one of the scientists, a tall florid-faced old bird who looked like an elderly retired butcher and was, in fact, as I later discovered, the country’s leading expert in inertial and infra-red guidance systems, looked at me coldly and snapped: ‘Fantastic, absolutely fantastic. Imminent danger of attack. Bah! I don’t believe a word of it.’

  ‘What’s your theory of what happened to Dr Fairfield?’ I asked.

  ‘My theory?’ the retired butcher snapped. ‘No theory. We heard from Witherspoon – Fairfield used to visit him regularly, they were great friends – that they’d been out trolling for trevally –’

  ‘And he’d fallen overboard and the sharks got him, I suppose? The more intelligent the mind the more easily it falls for any old rubbish. I’d sooner rely on the babes in the wood than a scientist outside the four walls of his lab.’ Dale Carnegie wouldn’t have approved of any part of this. ‘I can prove it, gentlemen, but only by giving you bad news. Your wives are being held prisoner in the mine on the other side of the island.’

  They looked at me, then at each other, then back at me again.

  ‘Have you gone mad, Bentall?’ Hargreaves was staring at me through his pebble glasses, his mouth tight.

  ‘It would be better for you if I had. No doubt you gentlemen imagine your wives are still in Sydney or Melbourne or wherever. No doubt you write to them regularly. No doubt you hear from them regularly. No doubt you will keep their letters, or some of them. Or am I wrong, gentlemen?’

  No one said I was wrong.

  ‘So, if your wives are all writing from different homes, you would expect, by the law of averages, that most of them would use different paper, different pens, different inks and that the different postmarks on the envelopes would not all be printed in the same colours. As scientists, you will all have respect for the law of averages. I suggest we compare your letters and envelopes. No one wants to read any private correspondence, just to make a superficial comparison of likenesses and differences. Would you like to co-operate? Or’ – I glanced at the red-faced man –’ are you scared to learn the truth?’

  Five minutes later the red-faced man was no longer red-faced, and he had learned the truth. Of the seven envelopes produced, three had been of one brand, two of another and two of a third – enough not to make incoming mail look suspiciously alike. The postmarks on the envelopes, so beautifully clear-cut as to suggest they had been stolen, not manufactured by unauthorized persons, were all in the same colour. Only two pens, a fountain and a ballpoint, had been used for the seven letters and the last point was the final clincher – every letter but one had been written on exactly the same notepaper. They must have thought themselves safe enough there, middle-aged and elderly scientists don’t usually show their letters around.

  After I’d finished and given the letters back to their owners, they exchanged glances, dazed glances where the lack of understanding was matched only by the increasing fear. They believed me all right now.

  ‘I thought my wife’s tone was rather strange in recent letters,’ Hargreaves said slowly. ‘She’s always been so full of humour and poking fun at scientists and now – ’

  I’ve noticed the same,’ someone else murmured. ‘But I put it down to –’

  ‘You can put it down to coercion.’ I said brutally. ‘It’s not easy to be witty when a gun is pointing at your head. I don’t pretend to know how the letters were introduced into your incoming mail but it would be a simple matter to a mind as brilliant as that of the man who killed Witherspoon. For he is brilliant. Anyway, you can introduce mail into mailbags for a hundred years and no one will ever notice, it’s only when you start taking it out that eyebrows begin to lift.’

  ‘But – but what does it all mean?’ Hargreaves’ voice had a shake in it and his hands were clenching and unclenching in involuntary nervousness. ‘What will they – what are they going to do with our wives?’

  ‘You must give me a minute,’ I said tiredly. ‘It’s as big a shock for me to find you here as it is for you to find out where your wives are. I think you’re safe enough now, and the rocket installation, but I believe your wives to be in deadly danger. There’s no good blinking facts, expediency is all that matters to the men we’re against and humanity not at all. If you move wrongly, you may never see them again. Let me think, please.’

  They wandered off reluctantly to complete dressing, I thought, but the first part of my thinking was far from constructive. I thought of that old fox Colonel Raine, and I thought of him with something less than affection. I supposed that after twenty-five years in the business it was impossible for him to let his right hand know what his left was doing. But, more than that, he had made an extraordinarily accurate assessment of the Bentall character. What there was of it.

  I hadn’t even bothered to ask the scientists whether they had been a party to the advertisements in the Telegraph. Obviously, they must have been. On a project involving the need for absolute secrecy and security, the last thing the government could have afforded was the sudden, simultaneous and unexplained vanishing of eight of Britain’s top scientists. The men for this job had been picked
long before the advertisements appeared and the adverts had merely been a device to have them removed from the country without raising any questions or eyebrows: and as those scientists had been ostensibly leaving Britain for keeps, it had been essential that their wives accompany them. Rough on the wives, perhaps, but it had to be. No wives, no deception: when he is going to live permanently abroad not even the most absent-minded scientist forgets to bring his wife along.

  Obviously, too, as it had been a government project, Raine had known all about it, in fact he was probably the man who had made all the necessary undercover arrangements. I thought of how I had completely swallowed the old colonel’s story and I cursed him for his devious and twisted mind.

  But, for Raine, it had been necessary, because, somehow or other – his contacts, his sources of information were legion – he had discovered or strongly suspected that the wives of the men who had gone to Vardu Island were no longer in their Australian homes. He would have come to the conclusion that they were being held captive or hostage. He would have worked out why and come to the same conclusion as I recently had.

  But he would never have guessed that they were on Vardu, for it was almost certainly Colonel Raine himself who had worked out with the now murdered Witherspoon the scheme to have Vardu used as a protected area based on archaeological discovery: whether discoveries were genuine or not was a matter of complete unimportance: old Witherspoon and his associates would have been screened with a tooth-comb and the idea of associating any skulduggery with that part of the island would have been fantastic. Vardu would have been the last place Raine would have thought of to look for them: he had just no idea at all where they were.

  So he had fed me this yarn about sending me out to find the missing scientists but what he had actually intended was that Marie should find the missing scientists’ wives. She would find them, he reasoned, by being seized as they had been and for the same reasons, and all he could hope for was that she or I or both could do something about it: but if he had let me think for a moment that that was what he had in mind he knew I would never have gone along with it. He knew what I thought about throwing women to the wolves. Instead of Marie coming along as local colour for me, I was going as local colour, little better than a stooge for her. I remembered now what he had said about her being much more experienced than I was, that it might end up with her looking after me, not vice versa, and I felt about six inches tall. I wondered how much of all this, if any, was known to Marie herself.