Fear is the Key

by Alistair MacLean

  I made my way aft over the tanks. There were raised trapdoors with large clips which stuck out at all angles, there were fore-and-aft and athwart-ships pipes of every conceivable size and at every conceivable height, there were valves, big wheels for turning those valves and nasty knobbly ventilators, and I don’t think I missed one of all of those, with my head, kneecaps or shins, on the way aft. It was like hacking your way through a virgin jungle. A metal virgin jungle. But I made it, and I made it with the sure knowledge that there wasn’t a trap or hatch on that deck able to take anything larger than a human being.

  There was nothing for me in the stern either. Most of the deck space and superstructure there was given over to cabins: the one big coach-type hatch was glassed in and had a couple of skylights open. I used the flash. Engines. That ruled that hatch out. And the whole of the upper deck.

  Andrew was waiting patiently in the dinghy. I felt, rather than saw, his inquiring look and shook my head. Not that I had to shake my head. When he saw me clamping on my rubber skull-cap and oxygen mask that was all the answer he needed. He helped me make fast a life-line round the waist, and it took the two of us a whole minute: the rubber raft was pitching and bouncing about so much that we had one hand for ourselves and only one for the job.

  With the closed oxygen circuit the safe maximum depth I could get was about twenty-five feet. The oiler drew perhaps fifteen, so I had plenty in hand. The underwater search for a wire, or for something suspended from a wire, proved far easier than I had anticipated, for even at fifteen feet the effect of the surface swell motion was almost negligible. Andrew paid out, slackened and tightened the life-line to adjust to my every underwater movement as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his working life, which indeed he had. I covered the entire submerged length of the oiler twice, keeping close to the bilge keels on either side, examining every foot of the way with a powerful underwater flash. Halfway along the second sweep I saw a huge moray eel, which writhed out of the darkness beyond the beam of the torch and thrust its head with its evil unwinking eyes and vicious poisonous teeth right up against the glass of the flashlight: I clicked the beam on and off a couple of times and he was gone. But that was all I saw.

  I felt tired when I got back to the rubber dinghy and hauled myself aboard. I felt tired because fifteen minutes’ hard swimming in an oxygen outfit would make anybody tired: but I knew too well if I’d found what I’d been looking for tiredness would never have touched me. I’d banked heavily on finding what I’d been looking for in on or under that ship. I felt let down.

  I felt tired and low and dispirited and cold. I wished I could smoke. I thought of a crackling wood fire, of steaming coffee and a long long nightcap. I thought of Herman Jablonsky sleeping peacefully in his big mahogany bed back in the general’s house. I stripped off mask and cylinder, kicked the flippers off my feet, pulled on a pair of shoes with numbed and fumbling fingers, flung my pants, coat and hat up on the deck of the oiler and dragged myself up after them. Three minutes later, dressed in my outer clothes and dripping like a blanket that’s just been hauled from a wash-boiler, I was on my way up the enclosed gangway to the well-deck of the oil rig a hundred feet above my head.

  Drifting grey cloud had washed the last of the starlight out of the sky, but that didn’t help me any. I’d thought the overhead lamp illuminating the gangway had been weak, but it hadn’t, it had only been distant. By the time I was ten feet from the underside of the platform it was a searchlight. And if they kept a gangway watch? Did I tell them I was the Second Engineer from the oiler and was suffering from insomnia? Did I stand there and spin a plausible story while the moisture dripping down under my pants from the diving-suit formed a pool of water under my feet and my vis-à-vis examined with interest the ruched high-necked glistening rubber where my collar and tie ought to have been? I had no gun, and I was prepared to believe that anyone in any way associated with General Ruthven and Vyland pulled on his shoulder holster before his socks when he got up in the morning: certainly everyone I’d met so far had been a walking armoury. And if a gun were pulled on me? Did I start running down a hundred and thirty steps while someone picked me off at their leisure? Of course I didn’t have to run, the fire-escape gangway was only enclosed on three sides, but the fourth opened seawards and I wouldn’t bounce far off that maze of valves and pipes on the oiler below. I concluded that any halfway intelligent man would have gone straight back down.

  I went right on up.

  There was no one there. The gangway emerged in an alcove closed off on three sides – by the railed platform edge on one side, by high steel walls on the other two. The fourth side gave directly on to the well-deck where the crane was. What little I could see of this well was brightly illuminated and I could hear the clank of machinery and the voices of men not thirty feet away. It didn’t seem like a good idea to wander straight out into their midst so I looked for another way out. I found it at once, a set of steel rungs built into one of the twelve-foot high steel bulkheads by my side.

  I went up those, flattening myself out as I went over the top, crawled a few yards then stood up behind the shelter of one of the huge pillars. I could see the whole panorama of the oil rig now.

  A hundred yards away, on the larger raised platform, to the north, was the derrick itself, looking more massive than ever, with control cabins at its base and men moving around: under the surface of that platform, I supposed, would be the power-generating machinery, the living accommodation. The smaller platform to the south, the one on which I stood, was almost completely bare with a semi-circular extension reaching out over the sea to the south. The purpose of this large cleared space baffled me for a moment and then something clicked in my memory: Mary Ruthven had said that the general normally commuted between oil-rig and shore in his helicopter. The helicopter would need a landing-ground. This was it.

  On the well-deck between the two platforms, almost at my feet, men were moving large barrels with the aid of a tracked crane, trundling them into a brightly-lit opening half-way along the high bulkhead on the northern platform. Oil would be piped aboard, so those barrels could only be ‘Mud’, a chemical mixture of barites used for forcing down under pressure the cement that formed the outer casing of the drill hole. There was a whole series of those big storage sheds, most of them open, extending right across the width of the rig. There, if anywhere, would be what I was looking for.

  I crossed to the far side of the south platform, found another set of rungs and dropped down to the well-deck. There was nothing to be gained by caution or stealth now; apart from the fact that they would only excite suspicion, the time factor was becoming all-important: with the weather steadily worsening – the wind now seemed twice as strong as it had been half an hour previously and it wasn’t just a factor of the height – Captain Zaimis would be climbing up the mast. Perhaps he might even be forced to take off without me. But there was no future in that thought and certainly none for me. I put it out of my mind and crossed to the first of the storage bays.

  The door was held on a heavy steel latch, unlocked. I opened the latch, pushed back the door and passed inside. It was pitch dark, but my torch found the light switch right away. I pressed it and looked around.

  The bay was perhaps a hundred feet long. Stacked in nearly empty racks on both sides were three or four dozen screwed pipes almost as long as the bay itself. Round each pipe, near the end, were deep gouge marks as if some heavy metal claws had bitten into it. Sections of the drill pipe. And nothing else. I switched off the light, went out, pulled shut the door and felt a heavy hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Would you be looking for something, my friend?’ It was a deep rough no-nonsense voice, as Irish as a sprig of shamrock.

  I turned slowly, but not too slowly, pulling the lapels of my coat together with both hands as if to ward off the wind and the thin cold rain that was beginning to sift across the deck, glittering palely through the beams of the arc-lamps then vanishing into the darkness again. He wa
s a short stocky man, middle-aged, with a battered face that could be kindly or truculent as the needs of the moment demanded. At that moment, the balance of expression was tipped on the side of truculence. But not much. I decided to risk it.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I am.’ Far from trying to conceal my British accent, I exaggerated it. A marked high-class English accent in the States excites no suspicion other than the charitable one that you may be slightly wrong in the head. ‘The field foreman told me to inquire for the – ah – roustabout foreman. Are you he?’

  ‘Golly!’ he said. I felt that it should have been ‘begorrah’ but the grammatical masterpiece had floored him. You could see his mind clambering on to its feet again. ‘Mr Jerrold sent you to look for me, he?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Miserable night, isn’t it?’ I pulled my hat-brim lower. ‘I certainly don’t envy you fellows –’

  ‘If you was looking for me,’ he interrupted, ‘why were you poking about in there?’

  ‘Ah, yes. Well, I could see you were busy and as he thought he had lost it in there, I thought perhaps I –’

  ‘Who had lost what where?’ He breathed deeply, patience on a monument.

  ‘The general. General Ruthven. His brief-case, with very important private papers – and very urgent. He’d been making a tour of inspection yesterday – let me see, now, it would have been early afternoon – when he received the dastardly news –’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘When he heard his daughter had been kidnapped. He went straight for his helicopter, forgetting all about the brief-case and –’

  ‘I get you. Important, huh?’

  ‘Very. General Ruthven says he’d put it down just inside some doorway. It’s big, morocco, marked

  C. C. F. in gold letters.’ ‘C.C.F.? I thought you said it was the general’s?’ ‘The general’s papers. He’d borrowed my case. I’m Farnborough, his private confidential secretary.’ It was very long odds indeed against one of the scores of roustabouts foremen employed by the general knowing the real name of his secretary, C. C. Farnborough.

  ‘C.C., eh?’ All suspicions and truculence now vanished. He grinned hugely. ‘Not Claude Cecil by any chance?’

  ‘One of my names does happen to be Claude,’ I said quietly. ‘I don’t think it’s funny.’

  I had read the Irishman rightly. He was instantly contrite.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Farnborough. Talkin’ outa turn. No offence. Want that me and my boys help you look?’

  ‘I’d be awfully obliged.’

  ‘If it’s there we’ll have it in five minutes.’

  He walked away, issued orders to his gang of

  men. But I had no interest in the result of the search, my sole remaining interest lay in getting off that platform with all speed. There would be no brief-case there and there would be nothing else there. The foreman’s gang were sliding doors open with the abandon of men who have nothing to conceal. I didn’t even bother glancing inside any of the bays, the fact that doors could be opened without unlocking and were being opened indiscriminately in the presence of a total stranger was proof for me that there was nothing to be concealed. And apart from the fact that there were far too many men there to swear to secrecy, it stood out a mile that that genial Irishman was not the type to get mixed up in any criminal activities. Some people are like that, you know it the moment you see and speak to them. The roustabout foreman was one of those.

  I could have slipped away and down the gangway while the search was still going on but that would have been stupid. The search for the missing brief-case would be nothing compared to the all-out search that would then start for C. C. Farnborough. They might assume I had fallen over the side. Powerful searchlights could pick up the Matapan in a matter of minutes. And even were I aboard the Matapan I didn’t want to leave the vicinity of the rig. Not yet. And above all I didn’t want the news to get back ashore that an intruder disguised as, or at least claiming to be, the general’s secretary had been prowling around the X 13.

  What to do when the search was over? The foreman would expect me to go back to the derrick side, where the accommodation and offices were, presumably to report failure of a mission to Mr Jerrold. Once I left for there my retreat to the gangway would be cut off. And so far it hadn’t occurred to the foreman to ask how I had arrived aboard the rig. He was bound to know that there had been no helicopter or boat out to the rig in hours. Which argued the fact that I must have been aboard for hours. And if I had been aboard for hours why had I delayed so long in starting this so very urgent search for the missing brief-case?

  The search, as far as I could see, was over. Doors were being banged shut and the foreman was starting back towards me when a bulkhead phone rang. He moved towards it. I moved into the darkest patch of shadow I could see and buttoned my coat right up to the neck. That, at least, wouldn’t excite suspicion: the wind was strong now, the cold rain driving across the well-deck at an angle of almost forty-five degrees.

  The foreman hung up and crossed over to where I was standing. ‘Sorry, Mr Farnborough, no luck. You sure he left it here?’

  ‘Certain, Mr – ah –’

  ‘Curran. Joe Curran. Well, it’s not here now. And we can’t look any more.’ He hunched deeper into his black glistening oilskin. ‘Gotta go and start yo-yo-ing that damn pipe.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said politely.

  He grinned and explained: ‘The drill. Gotta haul it up and change it.’

  ‘On a night like this and in a wind like this? And it must take some time.’

  ‘It takes some time. Six hours if we’re lucky. That damned drill’s two and half miles straight down, Mr Farnborough.’

  I made the proper noises of astonishment instead of the noises of relief I felt like making. Mr Curran working on the derrick for the next six hours in this weather would have more to worry about than stray secretaries.

  He made to go. Already his men had filed past and climbed up a companionway to the north platform. ‘Coming, Mr Farnborough?’

  ‘Not yet.’ I smiled wanly. ‘I think I’ll go and sit in the shelter of the gangway for a few minutes and work out what I’m going to tell the general.’ I had an inspiration. ‘You see, he only phoned up about five minutes ago. You know what he’s like. Lord knows what I’m going to tell him.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s tough.’ The words meant nothing, already his mind was on the recovery of the drill. ‘Be seein’ you.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ I watched him out of sight and two minutes later I was back aboard the rubber dinghy: another two minutes and we had been hauled back to the Matapan.

  ‘You have been far too long, Mr Talbot,’ Captain Zaimis scolded. His small agitated figure gave the impression of hopping around in the darkness although it would have taken a monkey to hop around that pitching heaving sponge-boat without falling overboard with the first hop. The engine note was much louder now: not only had the skipper been forced to increase engine revolutions to keep a certain amount of slack on the rope tying the Matapan to the pillar, but the vessel was now pitching so wildly that almost every time the bows plunged deep into the sea the underwater exhaust beneath the stern came clear in a brief but carrying crackle of sound.

  ‘You have been successful, no?’ Captain Zaimis called in my ear.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So. It is sad. But no matter. We must leave at once.’

  ‘Ten minutes, John. Just another ten minutes. It’s terribly important.’

  ‘No. We must leave at once.’ He started to call the order to cast off to the young Greek sitting in the bows when I caught his arm.

  ‘Are you afraid, Captain Zaimis?’ Despicable, but I was desperate.

  ‘I am beginning to be afraid,’ he said with dignity. ‘All wise men know when it is time to be afraid and I hope I am not a fool, Mr Talbot. There are times when a man is selfish if he is not afraid. I have six children, Mr Talbot.’

  ‘And I have three.’ I hadn’t even one, not any more. I wasn’t even marrie
d, not any more. For a long moment we stood there, clinging on to the mast while the Matapan pitched and corkscrewed wickedly in that almost impenetrable darkness under the cavernous shadow of the oil rig, but apart from the thin whistling of the rain-laden wind in the rigging, it was a long silent moment. I changed my tactics. ‘The lives of men depend upon this, Captain Zaimis. Do not ask me how I know but I know. Would you have it said that men died because Captain Zaimis would not wait ten minutes?’

  There was a long pause, the rain hissed whitely into the heaving blackness of the sea beneath us, then he said: ‘Ten minutes. No more.’

  I slipped off shoes and outer clothing, made sure the life-line was securely tied to my waist just above the weights, slipped on the oxygen mask and stumbled forward to the bows, again thinking, for no reason at all, of big Herman Jablonsky sleeping the sleep of the just in his mahogany bed. I watched until a particularly big swell came along, waited until it had passed under and the bows were deep in the water, stepped off into the sea and grabbed for the rope that moored the Matapan to the pillar.

  I went out towards the pillar hand over hand

  – it couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away – but even with the rope to help me I got a pretty severe hammering and without the oxygen mask I don’t know how much water I would have swallowed. I collided with the pillar before I realized I was near it, let go the rope and tried to grab the pillar. Why, I don’t know. I might as well have tried to put my arms round a railway petrol tanker for the diameter was about the same. I grabbed the rope again before I was swept away and worked my way round to the left towards the seaward side of the massive steel leg. It wasn’t easy. Every time the Matapan’s bows rose with the swell the rope tightened and jammed my clutching hand immovably against the metal, but just so long as I didn’t lose any fingers I was beyond caring.