The Dark Crusader

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘I can count,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to spell it out for me.’

  ‘We had to spell it out for the Ministry of Defence.’ Hargreaves replied. ‘Took them three or four years to catch on, which is about par for the military mind. Look at the admirals and their battleships. The other great drawback of the Blue Streak, of course, is that it would have required a huge launching installation, all the ramps, gantries and blockhouses, the enormous trailers of helium and liquid nitrogen to pump in the kerosene and liquid oxygen under pressure, and, finally the vast size of the rocket itself. This meant a permanent and fixed installation, and with all those hordes of British and American planes flying over Russian territories, Russian planes flying over American and British territories and – for all I know, British and American flying over one another’s territories – those locations have become so well known that practically every launching base in the U.S. and Russia had a corresponding ICBM from the other country zeroed in on it.

  ‘What was wanted, then, was a rocket that could be fired instantaneously – and a rocket that was completely mobile, completely portable. This was impossible without any known missile fuel. Certainly not with the kerosene – kerosene, in this day and age! – which along with liquid oxygen still powers most of the American rockets. Certainly, either, not with the liquid hydrogen engines the Americans are working on today, the boiling point of 423°F makes them ten times as tricky to handle as anything yet known. And they’re far too big.’

  ‘They were working on caesium and ion fuels.’ I said.

  ‘They’ll be working on them for a long time to come. They’ve got a dozen separate firms working on those and you know the old saw about too many cooks. And so the mobile rocket ready for instant firing was impossible with any known propellant – until Fairfield came up with a brilliantly simple idea for solid fuel, twenty times as powerful as used in the American Minuteman. It’s so brilliantly simple.’ Hargreaves admitted, ‘that I don’t know how it works.’

  Neither did I. But I’d learnt enough from Fairfield to learn how to make it work. But here and now I never would.

  ‘You’re sure it really does work?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re sure, all right. On a small scale, that is. Dr Fairfield fitted a twenty-eight-pound charge to a specially constructed miniature rocket and fired it from an uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. It took off exactly as Fairfield had predicted, very slowly at first, far more slowly than conventional missiles.’ Hargreaves smiled reminiscently. ‘And then it started accelerating. We – the radar scanners – lost it about 60,000 feet. It was still accelerating and doing close on 16,000 miles an hour. Then more experiments, scaled down charges, till he got what he wanted. Then we multiplied the weight of the rocket, fuel, simulated warhead and brain by 400. And that’s the Dark Crusader.’

  ‘Maybe multiplying by 400 brings in some fresh factors.’

  ‘That’s what we’ve got to find out. That’s why we’re here.’

  ‘The Americans know about this?’

  ‘No.’ Hargreaves smiled dreamily. ‘But we hope they will some day. We hope to supply them with it in a year or two, that’s why it’s been designed far in excess of our own requirements, designed to carry a two-ton hydrogen bomb six thousand miles in fifteen minutes, reaching a maximum speed of 20,000 miles per hour. Sixteen tons compared to the 200 tons of their own ICBMs. Eighteen feet high compared to a hundred. Can be carried and fired from any merchant ship, coaster, submarine, train or heavy truck. All that and instant firing.’ He smiled again, and this time the dreaminess was suffused with a certain complacency. ‘The Yanks are just going to love the Dark Crusader.’

  I looked at him.

  ‘You’re not seriously suggesting that Witherspoon and Hewell are working for the Americans, are you?’

  ‘Working for the – ’ He pulled the spectacles down his nose and peered at me over the thick horn-rims, eyes wide in myopic astonishment. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘I just mean that if they aren’t I don’t see how the Americans are going to have a chance to look at the Crusader, far less love it.’

  He looked at me, nodded, looked away and said nothing. It seemed a shame to destroy his scientific enthusiasm.

  The dawn was in the sky now, even with the lamps still burning inside the Quonset we could see the lightening grey patches where the windows lay. My arm felt as if the Dobermann were still clinging to it. I remembered the half-finished glass of whisky on the table, reached up for it and said ‘Cheers.’ No one said cheers back to me, but I disregarded their unmannerly attitude and downed it all the same. It didn’t do me any good that I could feel. Farley, the infra-red guidance expert, gradually recovered his colour, courage and indignation and carried on a long and bitter monologue, in which the two words ‘damnable’ and ‘outrage’ were the recurring theme. He didn’t say anything about writing to his M.P. Nobody else said anything at all. Nobody looked at the dead man on the floor. I wished that someone would give me some more whisky, or even that I knew where Anderson had found the bottle. It seemed all wrong that I should be thinking more about the bottle than the dead man who’d given me my first drink from it. But then everything was wrong that morning, and besides, the past was past, the future – what remained of it – was to come and while the whisky might help nothing was surer than that Anderson would never help anyone again.

  Hewell returned at the dawn.

  He returned at the dawn and he returned alone, and it didn’t need the sight of his bloodstained left forearm to tell me why he had returned alone. The three guards by the wire must have been more watchful and more capable than he had imagined, but they hadn’t been capable enough. If Hewell was worried by his wound, the death of yet another of his men or the murder of three seamen, he hid his worry well. I looked round the faces of the men in the Quonset, faces grey and strained and afraid, and I knew I didn’t need to spell out for them what had happened. In different circumstances – in very different circumstances – it would have been funny to watch the play of expression on their faces, the utter disbelief that this could be happening to them struggling with the frightening knowledge that it was indeed happening to them. But right there and then it wasn’t any strain at all not to laugh.

  Hewell wasn’t in a word-wasting mood. He pulled out his gun, gestured to Hang to leave the hut, looked us over without expression and said the single word: ‘Out.’

  We went out. Apart from a sprinkling of palms down by the water’s edge there weren’t any more trees or vegetation on this side of the island than there had been on the other. The central mountain was much steeper on this side, and the great gash that bisected its southward side was well in sight, with one of the spurs running down from the northeast obscuring our view to the west and north.

  Hewell didn’t give us any time to admire the view. He formed us into a rough column of two, ordered us to clasp our hands above our heads – I paid no attention, I doubt whether I could have done it anyway and he didn’t press the matter – and marched us off to the north-west over the low spur of rock.

  Three hundred yards on, just over the first spur – another still lay ahead of us – I noticed about fifty yards away on my right a pile of broken rock, of very recent origin. From my lower elevation I couldn’t see what was behind that pile but I didn’t have to see to know: it was the exit of the tunnel where Witherspoon and Hewell had broken through in the early hours of the morning. I looked carefully all around me, plotting and remembering its position against every topographical feature I could see until I felt fairly certain that I could find it without trouble even on the darkest night. I marvelled at my incurable penchant for assimilating and storing away information of the most useless character.

  Five minutes later we were over the low crest of the second spur and could see the whole of the plain on the west side of the island stretched out in front of us. It was still in the shadow of the mountain, but it was full daylight now and easy to make out ever
y feature.

  The plain was bigger than the one to the east, but not much, maybe a mile long from north to south and four hundred yards wide between the sea and the first slopes of the mountain. There wasn’t a single tree to be seen. In the south-west corner of the plain a long wide pier stretched far out into the glittering lagoon, at our distance of four or five hundred yards this jetty seemed to be made of concrete but was more likely of coral blocks. At the far end of the pier, mounted on rails, with its supporting legs set very far apart, was a heavy crane of the type I’d seen in graving yards for ship repair work: the entire superstructure and jib – there was no counter-balance – were mounted on a ring of live rollers. This was the crane the phosphate company would have used to load its ships – and it was also the crane that must have formed one of the deciding factors in the Navy’s decision to set up its rocket installation on the island. It wasn’t often, I thought, that you would find ready-made unloading facilities with a pier and crane that looked as if it might be good for thirty tons on a deserted island in the South Pacific.

  Two other much narrower sets of rails ran up the pier. A few years ago, I supposed, one of those would have brought loaded phosphate wagons down to the pierhead while the other took the empty ones away. Today, one could still see one of the original sets of lines as it left the pier curving away to the south, rusted and overgrown, towards the phosphate mine: but the other set had been removed and replaced by new lengths of fresh shining rail that led straight inland for a distance of perhaps two hundred yards. Halfway along its length it passed over a curious circular pad of concrete about twenty-five yards in diameter, and finally ended in front of a hangar-shaped building, about thirty feet high, forty wide and a hundred in length. From where we stood almost directly behind the hangar it was impossible to see either its doors or where the rails ended, but it was a safe guess that the latter went all the way inside. The hangar itself was dazzling, it appeared to have been painted in pure white; but it was covered not in paint but in a painted white canvas, a measure, I supposed, designed to reflect the sun’s rays and make work possible inside a building made of corrugated iron.

  Some little distance north of this stood what were clearly the living-quarters, a group of haphazardly placed buildings, squat, ugly and obviously prefabricated. Farther to the north again, at a distance of almost three-quarters of a mile from the hangar, was what seemed to be a solid square of concrete set into the ground. At that distance it was hard to tell, but it didn’t look to be any more than two or three feet high. At least half a dozen tall steel poles rose from this concrete, each pole topped with a meshed scanner or radio antenna, all different in design.

  Hang led us straight to the nearest and largest of the prefabricated huts. There were two men outside, Chinese, both with automatic carbines. One of them nodded, and Hang stood aside to let us pass through the open door.

  The room beyond was obviously the ratings’ mess. Fifteen feet wide by forty long, it had threetiered bunks arranged the full length of both walls, with walls and bunks liberally decorated with pin-ups in every shape and form. Between each pair of vertical trios of bunks was a threepart locker: more art. Four mess tables, joined end to end to make one table and scrubbed as snowy white as the floor they stood on, ran the full length of the room. Set in the far wall of the room was a door. The sign above it read: ‘P.O.’s mess.’

  On the benches round the two most distant tables sat about twenty men, petty officers and ratings. Some were fully dressed, others hardly dressed at all. One was slumped across the table, like a man asleep, his head pillowed on his bare forearms and his forearms and the table below covered with clotted blood. None of the men looked shocked or scared or worried, they just sat there with tight and angry faces. They didn’t look the type to scare easily, there were no kids among them, the Navy would have picked its best, its most experienced men for this operation, which probably explained why Hewell and his men, even with the elements of surprise and ambush on their side, had run into trouble.

  Four men sat side by side on a bench by the top table. Like the men at the lower tables they had their hands clasped in front of them, resting on the wood. Each man had his epaulettes of rank on his shoulders. The big grey-haired man on the left with the puffed and bleeding mouth, the grey watchful eyes and the four gold bars would be Captain Griffiths. Beside him a thin balding hook-nosed man with three bars spaced by purple, an engineer commander. Next to him a blond young man with red between his two gold bars, that would be Surgeon-Lieutenant Brookman; and finally another lieutenant, a red-haired youngster with bitter eyes and a white compressed line where his mouth should have been.

  Five Chinese guards were spaced round the walls of the room. Each carried an automatic carbine. By the head of the first table, smoking a cheroot, with a malacca cane – no gun – in his hand and looking more benign and scholastic than ever, was the man I had known as Professor Witherspoon. Or so I thought until he turned and looked directly at me and then I saw, even although there was no particular expression on his face, that I could be wrong about the benign part of it. For the first time ever I saw him without the tinted glasses, and I didn’t like what I saw: eyes with the lightest pupils I have ever seen, but misted, eyes with the flat dull look of inferior coloured marbles. They were the eyes you sometimes see on men who are completely blind.

  He glanced at Hewell and said: ‘Well?’

  ‘Well,’ Hewell said. Every man in the room, except the red-haired lieutenant, was staring at him, I’d forgotten the impact that the first sight of this moving Neanderthalic mountain could make. ‘We got them. They were suspicious and waiting, but we got them. I lost one man.’

  ‘So.’ Witherspoon turned to the captain. ‘That accounts for everyone?’

  ‘You murdering fiends, ‘the grey-haired man whispered. ‘You fiends! Ten of my men killed.’

  Witherspoon gave a slight signal with his cane and one of his guards stepped forward and placed his carbine barrel against the back of the neck of the rating next to the one who lay with his head pillowed on his arms.

  ‘That’s all,’ Captain Griffiths said quickly. ’I swear that is all.’

  Witherspoon gave another signal and the man stepped back. I could see the white mark where the gun had been pressing in the man’s neck, the slow droop of the shoulders as he exhaled in a long soundless breath. Hewell nodded at the dead man beside him.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I asked this young fool here’ – Witherspoon pointed at the red-haired lieutenant – ‘where all the guns and ammunition were stored. The young fool wouldn’t tell me. I had that man there shot. Next time I asked he told me.’

  Hewell nodded absently as if it was the most right and natural thing in the world to shoot a man if another withheld information, but I wasn’t interested in Hewell, I was interested in Witherspoon. The absence of spectacles apart, he hadn’t changed externally at all: but for all that the change was complete. The quick bird-like movements, the falsetto affected voice, the repetitive habit of speech had vanished: here now was a calm, assured, ruthless man, absolute master of himself and all around him, a man who never wasted an action or a word.

  ‘Those the scientists?’ Witherspoon went on.

  Hewell nodded and Witherspoon waved his cane towards the far end of the room.

  ‘They’re in there.’

  Hewell and a guard started to shepherd the seven men towards the P.O.s’ mess. As they passed by Witherspoon, Farley stopped and stood before him with clenched hands.

  ‘You monster,’ he said thickly. ‘You damned – ’

  Witherspoon didn’t seem even to look at him. His malacca cane whistled through the air and Farley screamed in agony and staggered back against the bunks, clutching his face with both hands. Hewell caught him by the collar and sent him staggering and stumbling the length of the room. Witherspoon never even looked at him. I had the vague idea that Witherspoon and I weren’t going to get along very well in the near future.
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  The door at the far end opened, the men were bundled inside and then the door was closed again, but not before we all heard the high-pitched excited disbelieving voices of women.

  ‘So you kept them under wraps while the Navy was doing your work for you.’ I said slowly to Witherspoon. ‘Now that you no longer need the Navy but do need the scientists – no doubt to supervise and develop the building of fresh rockets wherever you’re going – well, you need the wives, too. How else could you make their husbands work for you?’

  He turned to face me, the long, thin, whippy cane swinging gently in his hand. ‘Who asked you to speak?’

  ‘You hit me with that cane,’ I said, ‘and I’ll choke out your life with it.’

  Everthing was suddenly peculiarly still. Hewell, on his way back, halted in mid-stride. Everybody, for some reason best known to himself, had stopped breathing. The thunder of a feather falling on the floor would have had them all airborne. Ten seconds, each second about five minutes long, passed. Everyone was still holding his breath. Then Witherspoon laughed softly and turned to Captain Griffiths.

  ‘I’m afraid Bentall here is of a rather different calibre from your men and our scientists,’ he said, as if in explanation. ‘Bentall is, for instance, an excellent actor: no other man has ever fooled me so long or so successfully. Bentall allows himself to be savaged by wild dogs and never shows a sign. Bentall, with one arm out of commission, meets up with two experienced knife-fighters in a darkened cave and kills them both. He is also, for good measure, highly skilled in burning down houses.’ He shrugged, almost apologetically. ‘But, then, of course, it requires a very special man to become a member of Britain’s Secret Service.’