by Jack Higgins
The night sky was dark and there was no moon, but the stars glittered coldly except to the east where they were obscured by heavy cloud. He walked to the rail and stood listening to the small sounds of the night, and the rich, pungent stench of the marsh filled his nostrils and he felt better. A light mist curled over the water, obscuring the surface, and hope flickered in his mind. His hands gripped the rail convulsively and he peered at the mist and wondered if it would thicken.
Behind him he was aware of heavy breathing and then a small, broken snore. He crouched down and discovered O'Hara asleep, his head against the wheelhouse, an empty bottle of rum on the deck beside him.
For a moment anger lifted in Hagen's throat and then he relaxed completely, drained of all emotion. Charlie had been right in the beginning. You couldn't rely on a rum-soaked old man, not even when danger threatened. He left him there and moved to the wheelhouse to check the time. It was a little after one o'clock. He went back on deck and stood at the rail thinking, and he shivered suddenly as a small wind began to creak through the reeds with a sibilant whispering. He became aware for the first time that his clothing was still damp and he went back into the cabin and undressed quickly. He towelled his tender body briskly and pulled on dry pants and a heavy woollen sweater and moved quietly into the girl's cabin.
He listened for a moment to her regular breathing and then went into the galley and began to prepare coffee on the stove. He covered the small port-holes with a blanket and turned on the light, and then he quietly brought all the remaining arms through from his cabin and began to check them. As he carefully reloaded the remaining sub-machine-gun there was a slight noise and he looked up sharply. Rose stood in the doorway. She was swathed in one of her blankets and somehow she looked completely defenceless. Her eyes had sunk back into their sockets and she looked desperately ill and exhausted. Hagen put down the weapon quickly and stood up. 'You look pretty rough,' he said. 'Sit here.' He gently moved her to a seat and went to the stove.
As he prepared the coffee she said: 'I want to apologize. I caused you a lot of trouble.' He ignored the opening and kept his back to her and she went on, 'I think I was almost out of my mind.' She coughed heavily and seemed to choke. 'I'll never forget the look on Steve's face when he disappeared under the water.'
Hagen turned and handed her a mug. 'I've put plenty of sugar in it,' he said. 'And I want you to take these pills.'
He took a small box from a drawer and handed her two capsules and she said suspiciously, 'What are they?'
'Don't worry,' he said, reassuringly, 'they're harmless. Benzedrine. They'll give you the energy necessary to get through the rest of this affair.'
She took the capsules without argument and washed them down with coffee. After a while she said, 'Mark, you're sure Steve was ...'
Hagen nodded. 'He was dead before I let go of him. Tsen shot him twice at point-blank range. It was bad luck. Just one of those things.'
She laughed bitterly. 'Just one of those things? He was alive yesterday and now he's dead. That's all I know.'
Hagen lit a cigarette and took a brandy bottle from the cupboard. He poured a generous measure into his coffee and said slowly, 'Look, this may not help you, but Mason didn't think he stood a very good chance of getting back alive.'
She stared at him with tragic eyes and moaned: 'Then why? Why did he come?'
Hagen shrugged. 'He came for the same reason I did. Because it was his last chance. Because there wasn't anything else he could do.'
The silence was heavy and oppressive and she nervously squeezed her hands around the mug and said: 'Did he know - about the gold? That you were only going to give me a share and keep the rest?'
For a single moment Hagen was about to say no. To tell her that Mason at least had been honest with her, but the moment passed. Somewhere near at hand Mason seemed to smile sardonically and Hagen said: 'Everybody was in on it. They all wanted a share.'
She smiled harshly and stared blindly into space. 'What a fool I was. What a fool I was to believe you.'
He felt the thrust of that barbed charge as though it had penetrated his flesh. She held no one responsible but him. For her, the others were of no account. For a moment an unreasoning anger moved in him and he turned and poured coffee into his cup with an unsteady hand. 'Did you really imagine that men would risk suicide for wages when they could have so much more?'
'No - I was never so simple.' She stood up and placed the mug on the seat beside her. 'From the beginning it was an unbelievable dream. You were the reality. I believed in you - no other. I thought you were doing it because you loved me.' She walked quietly back into her cabin and closed the door.
For a little while he sat staring into space and thinking, and then he sighed and said, half aloud, 'What a damned pity it had to come too late.'
He finished loading the sub-machine-gun and the carbine and then he primed the remaining grenades. He counted them in satisfaction. There were eight and he smiled slightly. Kossoff was not going to take them so easily. As he stood up the door opened and the girl returned. She was wearing a spare pair of his pants with the bottoms rolled up and an old sweater. There was a subtle change in her appearance and it was nothing to do with clothes. She said briskly, 'What happens now?'
Hagen tucked the box of grenades under one arm and picked up the weapons. 'I think you'd better make a meal,' he said. 'I'll take these to the wheelhouse.'
'Where's O'Hara?'
He smiled tightly. 'Drunk. I left him on watch and he's sprawled out on deck.'
She turned to the stove and said: 'You'd better bring him down here. I'll make more coffee and try to sober him up.'
When he had stowed the weapons safely in the wheelhouse he returned to O'Hara. He crouched down and shook him and, as the old man groaned, slapped him several times in the face. O'Hara came awake and struggled for a moment and Hagen held him firmly and said: 'Shut up, you old bastard. I don't want to hear a peep out of you.'
He jerked O'Hara to his feet and half-dragged him through into the galley and deposited him on a seat. The old man blinked and ran a blue-veined hand over his face. 'I don't feel very well,' he said.
'You'll feel a damned sight worse if you don't sober up,' Hagen told him.
Rose handed the old man a mug of strong, black coffee. 'Drink it. You'll feel better.'
He took the mug with trembling hands and spilled half of it down his shirt. Hagen snorted with disgust and said, 'I can't trust you for five minutes at a time.' Rose laughed lightly and when he looked at her she was smiling in a peculiar fashion. He turned quickly and went up on deck.
He went into the wheelhouse and turned on the tiny light above the chart table and began to make calculations. It was two-fifteen and the rendezvous with Charlie's boat was for six o'clock. He examined the chart again and then went out on deck and gazed at the water. The mist had thickened appreciably and swirled up from the marsh in ghostly waves. He flicked his cigarette into the night and a smile creased his face. He looked up at the sky and could see only half the stars that had been visible an hour before. When he went down into the galley there was hope on his face.
'You look pleased with yourself,' Rose said as she put a plate of beans in front of him.
He nodded. 'Things are looking up,' he said. 'There's a heavy mist beginning to rise.'
'Won't that make it more difficult for us?' she said. 'How will we ever get out of the marshes if we can't see where we're going?'
He helped himself to coffee and smiled. 'The quickest way out of this place is by the deep-water channels. I can follow those pretty well by chart.'
'It's going to be dangerous, lad,' O'Hara said. 'Those divils are bound to be waiting at the mouth of the Kwai.'
Hagen nodded. 'Sure they will, but we haven't got any choice. Our rendezvous is in three and a half hours. The only way we'll make it is by leaving this place the easy way.'
Rose sat down opposite him, a mug of coffee in her hands. 'Do you really think we can get away
with it?' she said. Her voice was grave and steady and there was no hope in it.
He looked up and smiled. 'I think there's a chance. We'll have to play hide-and-seek in the mist, but remember - we've only got Kossoff to deal with, not the Chinese Navy. We know that now.'
She smiled and there was a surprising note of sadness in her voice as she said: 'You never give in, do you? What a man you could have been.'
For a moment their eyes locked and Hagen said sadly, 'We aren't always responsible for the way things work out.' She dropped her eyes and he lit a cigarette and said, 'I'm only asking for one more miracle and then I think we really do stand a chance.'
Suddenly there was a tapping on the roof overhead and Rose looked up in alarm, and then the tapping increased until a thousand fingers danced on the roof. Hagen got to his feet and ran quickly through the cabin and went on deck. He stood with his face upturned into the heavy rain and the girl stood beside him. He turned and laughed wildly down into her face. 'Well, there you are,' he said, 'the other miracle. Now I know we're going to get away with it.'
12
Hagen spent another half-hour with his charts, carefully calculating the route from the lagoon to the main channel of the Kwai. He decided to begin the journey at three forty-five. That would get them to the mouth of the Kwai in good time for the rendezvous, and the necessary speed would be so slow that the engines would hardly be audible in the heavy rain. O'Hara came to him in the wheelhouse, sober and contrite. He was full of apologies and Hagen cut him off short. 'All right. So you didn't mean any harm. Well for Christ's sake remember that we're facing the trickiest part of the whole deal during the next three hours. If you make a slip I swear I'll drop you over the side and you can swim back.'
'You can trust me, lad,' O'Hara said, drawing himself up straight. 'I've never let you down at the crucial moment yet.'
Hagen laughed cynically. 'Not bloody much. Get down to the engine-room and make sure everything's perfect. You've got half an hour.'
He carefully re-checked his calculations and grunted with satisfaction. There was a chance. A damned good chance. He went below to the galley and found Rose clearing the place up. 'Is that necessary?' he said.
She wiped a plate and shrugged. 'It gives me something to do.'
He pushed a cigarette between his lips. 'I think we stand a chance. I really do.'
She showed no enthusiasm. 'I see.'
He smoked silently for a moment, watching her as she worked, and finally said, 'You don't seem very pleased.'
'Should I be? After all, what will success mean to me?'
'Oh, for God's sake,' Hagen said. 'Nobody is trying to cheat you out of everything. If you have your own way you'll give everything to some crack-pot relief organization. If you play it my way you'll get a nice slice for yourself.' There was pity on her face and he turned away and said angrily, 'After all we've been through we deserve every damned penny of it.'
For a moment there was silence and then she moved behind him and put a hand on his arm. 'Can't you understand, Mark? It was a trust. My father died for it. I can't let him down.'
He shook his head in bewilderment. 'But you can't play the game that way, angel. Life isn't like that.'
She smiled sadly into his face. 'Then I'd rather not play at all.' She turned away and leaned on the table. When she spoke her voice was strong and hard, admitting no weakness. 'I'd rather see the gold back at the bottom of the sea than have it used for the wrong purpose.'
For a moment an angry retort was on his lips and then he cracked suddenly, and his shoulders sagged a little. There was a force here that he could not contend with on equal terms. He shook his head, an ironical smile on his lips, and said: 'Integrity and honour. I thought they'd gone out of fashion.' He grinned. 'Mason must be laughing his damned head off at me.'
She swung round and there was hope on her face. 'You'll help me, Mark? You'll help me to get the gold to Saigon?'
His face hardened and he shook his head slowly. 'Not a chance, angel. I can't afford your kind of ethics.'
Her shoulders sagged and she seemed to age ten years. 'I see.' She turned away and began to wipe another plate in a mechanical, defeated fashion.
Hagen said, 'Are you going to help us get out of here?'
She carefully put the last plate in the cupboard and turned towards him and he saw that there was a change in her. She was straight again and in full control. 'Yes, I'll help you.' She laughed bitterly. 'I'm trapped by my kind of ethics, you see. I'm thinking of that old man in the engine-room. If I refused to help you and we were caught, he would die, too, and I wouldn't like to have that on my conscience.'
For a moment they challenged each other and then Hagen turned away. 'If you'll come on deck, I'll show you what to do,' he said.
He gave her a heavy reefer coat as a protection against the rain, and a powerful electric torch. He took her forward to the prow and shone the torch out into the gloom. The heavy white beam lanced through the rain and mist and showed the reeds quite clearly on the far side of the lagoon. 'What do I have to do?' she said.
He explained. 'Stay here in the prow. We'll be going dead slow and I'll keep warning you when to look out for side channels. The waterways are pretty narrow and the torch should give you enough light. I don't want to use the spot.'
She nodded. 'Is that all?'
His smile was obscured by the night as he said: 'Don't bother about port and starboard. Just yell out right or left and then I'll know what you mean.' He turned on his heel and a thought struck him and he added: 'Hang on to the stay and be careful. I don't want you going over the side.'
Her voice came sadly from the darkness. 'Good luck, Mark.' For a brief moment he almost reached out his arms to her and then he turned quickly and went aft to the wheelhouse.
It was nearly four o'clock when the engines shuddered into life and he took Hurrier forward and into the barrier of reeds. Slowly and relentlessly they passed through and out into the larger lagoon beyond. He turned the wheel sharply and the boat swirled obediently round and proceeded into the mist towards the sea.
Hagen opened the window of the wheelhouse and rain kicked into his face. There was a slight wind blowing in from the sea, across the marshes, lifting the mist before it into weird shapes, and he could taste the salt of it on his lips. Very slowly and carefully the boat ploughed forward into the darkness, her engines no more than a dull rumble as though they slept. Hagen consulted his chart. At their present speed they should be approaching the first cut-off. He leaned out of the window and hailed the girl. 'Any minute now on your left there should be a channel.'
For a few minutes there was nothing, only the beam of her torch stabbing into the darkness ahead, and then she cried out and Hagen began to swing the wheel. The prow of the launch grazed a wall of reeds and he swung the wheel even further and then quickly spun it in his hands to straighten her, and they were proceeding safely along the new course.
They repeated the manoeuvre on three occasions without serious mishap. Only once did they overshoot and Hagen was compelled to reverse, but the time lost was of no consequence. Gradually a faint, pearly luminosity appeared and he was able to distinguish the greyness of the mist and then the dark, silver lances of the rain. On the next occasion he had to change course he was able to distinguish the turning for himself. He leaned out of the window and shouted to the girl: 'You can finish now. I can see well enough myself.'
She came aft and stood looking up at him. 'I'm soaked,' she said. 'I'm going below to change.'
Through the driving rain and the mist visibility was down to twenty yards, but the reeds were beginning to drop back and the channel was widening perceptibly. The water began to lift in long, swelling ripples, and waves kicked against the bottom of the launch. The wind was increasing and he turned into it, and knew that they were in the main channel of the Kwai and that a mile before them lay the open sea.
He slowed the engines even more until Hurrier crept forward in almost complete silence and
the roaring of the rain was the loudest thing that was to be heard. He lit a cigarette and closed the window and held the wheel lightly between his hands. It was almost over. He felt supremely confident. It was as if the whole thing had been planned from the very beginning. Even the mist and the rain had appeared right on time.
The whole thing was perfect and still he felt lousy. He found himself wishing the girl had been different. If only she'd been tougher, more worldly, it wouldn't have been so bad. As it was he felt as though he had taken advantage of a child. He wondered what would become of her after all this was over. He was going to have to force her share of the gold on her, but he was prepared for that. He knew that the real trouble lay in the fact that she might refuse to use it. Might even give it away. If she did that then her final end was plain and she didn't have the sort of toughness needed to survive. There was only one end for penniless girls in Macao, and suddenly he cursed and slammed his clenched fist against the wall. He couldn't see her turned loose on her own. She wasn't fit to look after herself. The door opened and she entered, carrying a mug of coffee. He smiled and took it gratefully. 'Thanks! I needed this.'
'How are we doing?'
'Not so bad. We're in the main channel out of the marshes. The tricky part comes later.' He locked the wheel and pulled the chart over and showed her. 'The mouth of the channel is pretty well ringed by sandbanks. The final outlet to the sea is rather narrow. If Kossoff is ahead of us, and I'm hoping he isn't, he'll be waiting there.'
She nodded and said seriously, 'Won't it be dangerous trying to get through the narrows?'
He shrugged. 'It depends. If he is there, then I'll have to think of something else.' He studied the chart and added: 'Once we reach the open sea our worries are over. Hurrier will show a clean pair of heels to that tub of Kossoff's, unless he's got something pretty special in the engine-room.'
'And afterwards?' she said.
He shrugged. 'Plain sailing. Charlie's freighter should be on time. The weather's been calm enough.'