Fear is the Key

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Hophead,’ I said softly. I’d nothing to lose.

  ‘What?’ His face was a mask of disbelief. He went into a crouch over his gun that would have been laughable in different circumstances. It wasn’t any strain at all not to laugh. ‘What did you say, copper?’

  ‘Junky,’ I said distinctly. ‘You’re all doped up so that you don’t know what you’re doing. What are you going to do with the body?’ It was the first time I’d ever thought of myself as a corpse and I didn’t care for the feeling very much. ‘Two of you couldn’t lift me out of here and if they find me shot in this cabin they’ll know it was you who did it and than you’ll be in for the high jump, because they still need my services very badly, more than ever. You won’t be popular, Larry boy.’

  He nodded cunningly as if he had just thought up all this himself.

  ‘That’s right, copper,’ he murmured. ‘I can’t shoot you in here, can I? We’ll have to go outside, won’t we, copper? Near the edge, where I can shoot you and shove you into the sea.’

  ‘That’s it,’ I agreed. This was macabre, this arrangement for my own tidy disposal, but I wasn’t going as crazy as Larry, I was gambling on my last hope. But the gamble was crazy enough.

  ‘And then they’ll be running around and looking for you,’ Larry said dreamily. ‘And I’ll be running around and looking for you too and all the time I’ll be laughing to myself and thinking about you and the barracuda down among the seaweed there and knowing that I’m smarter than any one of them.’

  ‘You have a charming mind,’ I said.

  ‘Haven’t I now?’ Again that high falsetto giggle and I could feel the hairs rise on the back of my neck. He poked at Mary with his foot, but she didn’t stir. ‘The dame will keep till I come back. I won’t be long, will I, copper? Come on. You first. And don’t forget I have a torch and a gun.’

  ‘I’m not likely to forget.’

  Neither Mary nor the radio operator had stirred. I was pretty sure that the operator wouldn’t stir for a long time, I could still feel the ache in my fist and foot. But I wasn’t at all sure about Mary, I wasn’t even sure that she wasn’t faking, her breathing seemed much too quick and irregular for an unconscious person.

  ‘Come on, now,’ Larry said impatiently. He thrust the gun painfully into the small of my back. ‘Out.’

  I went out, through the door, along the passage and through the outer door on to the wind- and rain-swept deck beyond. The outer door had opened on the sheltered side of the radio shack but in a moment we would be exposed to the pile-driving blast of that wind and I knew that when that moment came it would be then or never.

  It was then. Urged on by the revolver in my back I moved round the corner of the shack, crouched low and barrelling forward into that great wind as soon as it struck me. Larry wasn’t so prepared, not only was he slightly built but he was standing upright, and the sudden wavering and jerking of the torch beam on the deck by my feet was intimation enough to me that the wind had caught him off-balance, perhaps sent him staggering several feet backward. I lowered my head still farther until I was in the position of a hundred yards sprinter in the first two steps of the race and lurched forward into the wind.

  Almost at once I realized that I had miscalculated. I had miscalculated the strength of the wind, running into that hurricane was like running through a barrel of molasses. And I had also forgotten that while a seventy-mile-an-hour wind offers an almost insuperable resistance to a human being it offers relatively none to a heavy slug from a Colt with a muzzle velocity of 600 mph.

  I’d got maybe eight yards when the frantically searching torch beam picked me up and steadied on me, and managed to cover perhaps another two before Larry fired.

  Gangsters and hoodlums are notoriously the world’s worst marksmen, their usual method being to come within a couple of yards before firing or spraying the landscape with a sufficient hail of bullets to make the law of averages work for them and I had heard a hundred times that those boys couldn’t hit a barn door at ten paces. But maybe Larry had never heard of this, or maybe the rule applied only to barn doors.

  A mule-kick is nothing compared to the slamming stopping power of a forty-five. It caught me high up on the left shoulder and spun me round in a complete circle before dropping me in my tracks. But it was this that saved my life, even as I fell I felt the sharp tug on my oilskin collar as another slug passed through it. Those weren’t warning shots that Larry was firing: he was out to kill.

  And kill he would if I had remained another couple of seconds on that deck. Again I heard the muffled boom of the Colt – even at ten yards I could hardly hear it over the howling power of that wind – and saw sparks strike off the deck inches from my face and heard the screaming whirr of the spent bullets ricocheting off into the darkness of the night. But the sparks gave me hope, it meant that Larry was using full metal-jacketed slugs, the kind cops use for firing through car bodies and locked doors, and that made an awful sight cleaner wound than a mushrooming soft-nose. Maybe it had passed clear through the shoulder.

  I was on my feet and running again. I couldn’t see where I was running to and I didn’t care, all that mattered was running from. A blinding, bulleting gust of rain whistled across the deck and made me shut both eyes tight and I loved it. If I had my eyes shut so had Larry.

  Still with my eyes shut I bumped into a metal ladder. I grabbed it to steady myself and before I properly realized what I was doing I was ten feet off the ground and climbing steadily. Maybe it was just man’s age-old instinct to climb high to get out of danger that started me off but it was the realization that this ladder must lead to some sort of platform where I might fend off Larry that kept me going.

  It was a wicked, exhausting climb. Normally, even in that giant wind, it wouldn’t have given me so much trouble, but, as it was, I was climbing completely one-handed. My left shoulder didn’t hurt much, it was still too numb for that, the real pain would come later, but for the moment the entire arm seemed paralysed, and every time I released a rung with my right hand and grabbed for the one above, the wind pushed me out from the ladder so that my fingers hooked round the next rung usually at the full extent of my arm. Then I had to pull myself close with my one good arm and start the process all over again. After I’d climbed about forty rungs my right arm and shoulder were beginning to feel as if they were on fire.

  I took a breather, hooked my forearm over a rung and looked down. One look was enough. I forgot about the pain and weariness and started climbing faster than ever, hunching my way upwards like a giant koala bear. Larry was down there at the foot of the ladder, flickering his torch in all directions and even with that bird-brain of his it was only going to be a matter of time until it occurred to him to shine that torch upwards.

  It was the longest ladder I had ever climbed. It seemed endless, and I knew now that it must be some part of the drilling derrick, the ladder, I was now almost sure, that led up to the ‘monkey board,’ that narrow shelf where a man guided the half-ton sections of the drill pipe, as it came from the ground, into the storage-racks behind. The only thing I could remember about the monkey was the cheerless fact that it was devoid of handrails – those would only get in the way of the man guiding the heavy drill sections into place.

  A jarring vibrating clang as if the iron ladder had been struck by a sledge-hammer was Larry’s way of announcing that he had caught sight of me. The bullet had struck the rung on which my foot rested and for one bad moment I thought it had gone through my foot. When I realized it hadn’t I took another quick look down.

  Larry was coming up after me. I couldn’t see him, but I could see the torch clutched in one hand making regularly erratic movements as he swarmed his way up the ladder making about three times the speed I was. It wasn’t in character this, Larry could never have been accused of having an excess of courage: either he was loaded to the eyes or he was driven by fear – fear that I should escape and Vyland find out that he had been trying to murder me. And there was t
he further possibility, and a very strong one, that Larry had only one or two shells left in his gun: he couldn’t afford not to make those count.

  I became gradually aware of lightness above and around me. I thought at first that this must be a glow cast from the aircraft warning lights in the top of the derrick, but in the same instant as the thought occurred I knew it to be wrong: the top of the derrick was still over a hundred feet above where I was. I took another breather, screwed my eyes almost shut against the stinging lash of the rain and peered upwards into the murky gloom.

  There was a platform not ten feet above my head, with a light shining off feebly to the right. It wasn’t much of a light, but enough to let me see something of the dark maze of girders that was the derrick, enough to let me see a dark shadow above and also to the right which looked like some tiny cabin. And then Larry’s torch steadied and shone vertically upwards and I saw something that made me feel slightly sick: the platform above was not solid sheet-metal but open grille-work through which a person’s every move could be seen: gone were my hopes of waiting till Larry’s head appeared above the level of the platform and then kicking it off his shoulders.

  I glanced downwards. Larry was no more than ten feet below, and both his gun and torch were levelled on me, I could see the dull glint of light in the barrel and the dark hole in the middle where death hid. One little pull on the trigger finger and that dark hole would be a streaking tongue of fire in the darkness of the night. Curtains for Talbot. I wondered vaguely, stupidly, if my eyes would have time to register the bright flame before the bullet and the oblivion it carried with it closed my eyes for ever … And then, slowly, I realized that Larry wasn’t going to fire, not even Larry was crazy enough to fire, not then. The 185-pound deadweight of my falling body would have brushed him off that ladder like a fly and from that ten-storey height neither of us would have bounced off that steel deck enough so that anyone would notice.

  I kept on climbing and reached the top. Had it been a solid platform there and I don’t think I would have managed to pull myself on to it against that wind, my one good hand would just have scrabbled about on the smooth metal surface until exhaustion took me and I fell back off the ladder: but as it was I managed to hook my fingers in the openwork steel grille and drag myself on to the platform.

  Larry was close behind. He gestured with his torch and I got his meaning. I moved to one side, past the little cabin at the corner where a lamp on a recessed shelf threw a faint light that was cut off abruptly at waist level, and waited.

  Slowly, carefully, his eyes never leaving my face, Larry came over the top and straightened to his feet. I moved farther along the monkey-board, slowly, backwards, with my face to Larry. On my right I could dimly make out the big pipe storage racks, on my left the edge of the monkey board, no handrail, just a sheer drop of a hundred feet. Then I stopped. The gallery of the monkey-board seemed to run all the way round the outside of the derrick and it would have suited Larry just fine to have me out on the northern edge where, wind or no wind, a good shove – or a .45 slug – might have sent me tumbling direct into the sea a hundred and fifty feet below.

  Larry came close to me. He’d switched off his torch now. The fixed light on the cabin side might leave the lowermost three feet in darkness, but it was enough for him and he wouldn’t want to take even the remote chance of anyone spotting a flickering torchlight and wondering what any crazy person should be doing up on the monkey-board in that hurricane wind and with all the work stopped.

  He halted three feet away. He was panting heavily and he had his wolf grin on again.

  ‘Keep going, Talbot,’ he shouted.

  I shook my head. ‘This is as far as I’m going.’ I hadn’t really heard him, the response was purely automatic, I had just seen something that made me feel ice-cold, colder by far than the biting lash of that rain. I had thought, down in the radio shack, that Mary Ruthven had been playing possum, and now I knew I had been right. She had been conscious, she must have taken off after us immediately we had left. There was no mistaking at all that gleaming dark-blonde head, those heavily plaited braids that appeared over the top of the ladder and moved into the night.

  You fool, I thought savagely, you crazy, crazy little fool. I had no thought for the courage it must have taken to make that climb, for the exhausting nightmare it must have been, even for the hope it held out for myself. I could feel nothing but bitterness and resentment and despair and behind all of those the dim and steadily growing conviction that I’d count the world well lost for Mary Ruthven.

  ‘Get going,’ Larry shouted again.

  ‘So you can shove me into the sea? No.’

  ‘Turn round.’

  ‘So you can sap me with that gun and they find me lying on the deck beneath, no suspicion of foul play.’ She was only two yards away now. ‘Won’t do, Larry boy. Shine your torch on my shoulder. My left shoulder.’

  The flash clicked on and I heard again that maniac giggle.

  ‘So I did get you, hey, Talbot?’

  ‘You got me.’ She was right behind him now, that great wind had swept away any incautious sound she might have made. I had been watching her out of the corner of my eye, but now I suddenly looked straight at her over Larry’s shoulder, my eyes widening in hope.

  ‘Try again, copper,’ Larry giggled. ‘Can’t catch me twice that way.’

  Throw your arms round his neck or his legs, I prayed. Or throw your coat over his head. But don’t, don’t, don’t go for his gun-hand.

  She went for his gun-hand. She reached round his right side and I plainly heard the smack as her right hand closed over his right wrist.

  For a moment Larry stood stock-still. Had he jumped or twisted or moved, I would have been on to him like an express train, but he didn’t, the very unexpectedness of the shock temporarily petrified his gun hand too – it was still pointing straight at me.

  And it was still levelled at my heart when he made a violent grab for Mary’s right wrist with his left hand. A jerk up with his left hand, a jerk down with his right and his gun-hand was free. Then he moved a little to his left, jerked her forward a foot, pinned her against the storage racks to the right and started to twist her wrist away from him. He knew who he had now and the wolf grin was back on his face and those coal-black eyes and the gun were levelled on me all the time.

  For five, maybe ten seconds, they stood there straining. Fear and desperation gave the girl strength she would never normally have had, but Larry too was desperate and he could bring far more leverage to bear. There was a half-stifled sob of pain and despair and she was on her knees before him, then on her side, Larry still holding her wrist. I couldn’t see her now, only the faint sheen of her hair, she was below the level of the faint light cast by the lamp. All I could see was the madness in the face of the man opposite me, and the light shining from the shelf of the little cabin a few feet behind him. I lifted the heel of my right shoe off the ground and started to work my foot out of it with the help of my left foot. It wasn’t even a chance.

  ‘Come here, cop,’ Larry said stonily. ‘Come here or I’ll give the girl friend’s wrist just another little turn and then you can wave her goodbye.’ He meant it, it would make no difference now, he knew he would have to kill her anyway. She knew too much. I moved two steps closer. My heel was out of the right shoe. He thrust the barrel of the Colt hard against my mouth, I felt a tooth break and the salt taste of blood from a gashed upper lip, on the inside. I twisted my face away, spat blood and he thrust the revolver deep into my throat.

  ‘Scared, cop?’ he said softly. His voice was no more than a whisper, but I heard it above the voice of that great wind, maybe it was true enough, this business of the abnormally heightened sensitivity of those about to die. And I was about to die. I was scared all right, I was scared right to the depths as I had never been scared before. My shoulder was beginning to hurt, and hurt badly, and I wanted to be sick, that damned revolver grinding into my throat was sending waves of naus
ea flooding through me. I drew my right foot back as far as I could without upsetting my balance. My right toe was hooked over the tongue of the shoe.

  ‘You can’t do it, Larry,’ I croaked. The pressure on my larynx was agonizing, the gun-sight jabbing cruelly into the underside of my chin. ‘Kill me and they’ll never get the treasure.’

  ‘I’m laughing.’ He was, too, a horrible maniacal cackle. ‘See me, cop, I’m laughing. I’d never see any of it anyway. Larry the junky never does. The white stuff, that’s all my old man ever gives his ever-loving son.’

  ‘Vyland?’ I’d known for hours.

  ‘My father. God damn his soul.’ The gun shifted, pointed at my lower stomach. ‘So long, cop.’

  My right foot was already swinging forward, smoothly, accelerating, but unseen to Larry in the darkness.

  ‘I’ll tell him goodbye from you,’ I said. The shoe clattered against the corrugated iron of the little hut even as I spoke.

  Larry jerked his head to look over his right shoulder to locate the source of this fresh menace. For a split second of time, before he started to swing round again, the back of his left jawbone was exposed to me just as that of the radio operator had been only a few minutes before.

  I hit him. I hit him as if he were a satellite and I was going to send him into orbit round the moon. I hit him as if the lives of every last man, woman and child in the world depended on it. I hit him as I had never hit anyone in my life before, as I knew even as I did it that I could never hit anyone again.

  There came a dull muffled snapping noise and the Colt fell from his hands and struck the grille at my feet. For two or three seconds Larry seemed to stand there poised, then, with the unbelievably slow, irrevocable finality of a toppling factory chimney, he fell out into space.

  There was no terror-stricken screaming, no wild flailing of arms and legs as he fell to the steel deck a hundred feet below: Larry had been dead, his neck broken, even before he had started to fall.