by Jack Higgins
“Poor devil.” Chavasse raised one sticklike arm. “Ever seen anything like that before?”
Darcy examined the multiple tiny scars and nodded soberly. “A heroin addict from the look of it, and pretty far gone. I wonder who he is?”
Chavasse started to take off his anorak. “Last time I saw him was in a photo Mallory showed me, though I must say he was looking considerably healthier.”
“Montefiore?” Darcy said blankly.
“In person.” Chavasse raised the unconscious man, slipped the anorak down over his head and picked him up. “Now let’s get out of here before he dies on us.”
ON the return journey, Chavasse sat in the stern, Enrico Montefiore cradled in his arms. He was in a bad way, there was little doubt of that, and moaned restlessly, occasionally crying out. He never fully regained consciousness.
There was the sound of the Alsatian barking uncomfortably close somewhere, and then the harsh chatter of an outboard motor shattered the morning.
Chavasse sat with the compass in his free hand, relaying precise instructions to Darcy, who was putting his back into the rowing. At one point, they got stuck in a particularly thick patch of reeds and he eased Montefiore to the floor and went over the side to push.
It was cold—bitterly cold, for by this time the water had managed to get inside his nylon waders, and without his anorak the upper part of his body had no protection at all.
The dog barked monotonously, much nearer now, the sound of the outboard motor coming in relentlessly. Chavasse pushed hard and scrambled aboard as the dinghy moved again.
A few moments later, they broke from cover and drifted into clear water, and L’Alouette loomed out of the mist.
“Jacob!” Chavasse called, and then, as they moved closer, saw that Malik was sitting in the stern, his black umbrella shielding him from the rain.
The dinghy bumped gently against the side of L’Alouette. Chavasse stood up and looked straight into Malik’s face beneath the black umbrella, which he now realized was lashed to the stern rail with a length of rope. Malik’s eyes were fixed in death, his left ear was missing and there was a small blue hole just above the bridge of his nose.
“Good morning, Chavasse. Welcome aboard.”
Rossiter moved out of the cabin, smiling pleasantly as if really delighted to be meeting him again.
COLONEL Ho Tsen stood in the background, one side of his face covered in surgical tape. He was holding an AK assault rife and looked grim and implacable, every inch the professional.
“One of my men took a photo of you as you came in last night,” Rossiter said. “We always like to check on new arrivals in this part of the Camargue. You may imagine my surprise when he showed me the print.”
“You took your time getting here,” Chavasse said. “You’re not too efficient.”
“This wretched weather, old man. We got here just after you left. So we decided to wait. Actually, our time wasn’t wasted. Your friend was quite forthcoming after the colonel had a few words with him. Oh, yes, I now realize that you know all about us, Chavasse. On the other hand, we know all about you.”
“How nice for you. And what about Montefiore?”
“A problem. He’s done this before, which simply isn’t good enough. I must have a word with the person who was supposed to be looking after him.”
He went to the door, produced a whistle and blew three blasts. As he turned, Darcy Preston said harshly, “Who put him on heroin—you?”
“It keeps him amenable most of the time,” Rossiter said.
“As a living vegetable. Why don’t you let him die?”
“But who on earth would sign all the checks?” Rossiter demanded, in a half-humorous manner, as if trying to be reasonable about the whole thing.
Which explained a great deal. And then several things happened at once. Montefiore started to groan, thrashed his limbs wildly and sat up, and a dinghy powered by an outboard motor appeared from the mist carrying two Chinese men and the Alsatian.
The two men came aboard, leaving the dog in the dinghy. Ho Tsen spoke sharply to one of them in Chinese, so rapidly that Chavasse could not hear what was said. The man replied in a low voice, eyes down, and Ho Tsen slapped him across the face.
“Have they got a dose with them?” Rossiter demanded in Chinese.
One of the men put down his assault rifle and produced a small leather case. He opened it, took out a hypodermic and a glass ampoule. Rossiter filled the hypo and nodded to the Chinese man, who held Montefiore down by the shoulders. Rossiter gave him the injection.
“That should hold him.”
Montefiore stopped struggling and went very still, all tenseness leaving him, and then a strange thing happened. His eyes opened and he looked up at Rossiter and smiled.
“Father Leonard?” he said. “Father Leonard, is that you?”
And smiling, the breath went out of him in a quiet sigh and his head slipped to one side.
There was a sudden silence. Rossiter gently touched his face. It was Ho Tsen who moved first. He pushed Rossiter out of the way and shook Montefiore roughly. Then he turned, his eyes angry.
“He’s dead—do you understand? You’ve killed him. I warned you—I told you, you were giving him too much.” He struck out at Rossiter, sending him back against the other bunk. “One error after another. You’ll have a lot to answer for when we reach Tirana.”
For a moment, all attention was focused on the Englishman. Chavasse sent one of the other Chinese men staggering, turned and jumped for the door. He went over the rail, surfaced and struck out for the shelter of the reeds.
He threw a quick glance over his shoulder and saw Darcy struggling with the two Chinese men at the rail. Ho Tsen appeared, clubbed the Jamaican with the butt of his rifle and raised it to his shoulder. As he started to fire, Chavasse went under the water and swam for the reeds.
Safely in their shelter, he turned and looked back. The two Chinese men were already in the dinghy and casting off, the Alsatian howling like a wolf. Chavasse started to push through the reeds, half-swimming, half-wading. And then another sound rent the morning: the engine of L’Alouette as she got underway.
HE came to a waterway so deep that his feet failed to touch bottom. He swam across to a gray-green wall of palm grass and forced his way through. He paused after a few minutes, treading water. The sound of L’Alouette’s engine was fading. Presumably it was returning to Hellgate, but the outboard motor of the dinghy was popping away in the vicinity and the Alsatian’s mournful howl echoed eerily through the rain like a voice from the grave.
He started to swim again, pushing his way through the reeds, and suddenly, the sound of the outboard motor ceased abruptly and the dog stopped barking. Which wasn’t good, whichever way you looked at it, because now he didn’t have the slightest idea where they were.
His feet touched bottom, and he plowed through thick black mud and moved out of reeds and grass to relatively firm ground. The compass still hung around his neck, enabling him to check his direction, and he concentrated hard, trying to recapture a pictorial image of the map. It was an old trick and surprisingly effective. The island would be the only one of any size in the vicinity of L’Alouette’s anchorage, a couple of hundred yards in diameter and a quarter of a mile southwest of Hellgate.
He started to run, then came to a dead stop as a bull loomed out of the mist to confront him. The animal held its head high and stared him right in the eye. Steam drifted from its nostrils and Chavasse backed away slowly. There was a movement to his right as another bull appeared like a dark shadow, flanks glistening. It pawed the ground nervously, its head dipped, the great curving horns gleaming viciously, and then another appeared beyond the first and yet another, six or seven of the great beasts in all, fighting bulls reared for their courage and heart, bred to fight in the ring.
He took a deep breath and walked through them very slowly, passing so close between two of the outer circle that he could reach out and touch them. He kept on g
oing, stumbling through tussocks of marsh grass, and emerged on a sandy shore. There was a sharp cry, followed by two shots close together, and sand fountained into the air on his right.
The dinghy drifted out of the mist perhaps twenty yards away. In a single frozen moment of time, he saw clearly that the Alsatian was muzzled, but not for long. The AK assault rifle cracked again, and as Chavasse turned to run, the Alsatian took to the water.
He didn’t have long—a minute or a minute and a half at the most before it ran him down. He tugged feverishly at his belt as he stumbled on. There was a technique for handling big dogs, but its successful application depended entirely on keeping calm and having a hell of a lot of luck in the first few seconds of attack.
The belt came free, he looped it around each hand, then turned and waited, holding his hands straight out in front of him, the belt taut.
The Alsatian came out of the mist on the run and skidded briefly to a halt. In almost the same moment, he moved in, mouth wide. Chavasse pushed the belt at him and the old trick worked like a charm. The Alsatian grabbed at it, teeth tearing at the leather. Chavasse jerked with all his strength, bringing the dog up on its hind legs and kicked it savagely in the loins.
The Alsatian rolled over and he kicked it again in the ribs and the head. It howled terribly, writhing in the mud, and he turned and moved on as the two Chinese men arrived.
Another shot followed him, and from somewhere near at hand there was a roar of pain. The bulls. In the heat of the moment, he had forgotten about the bulls. There was a sudden trampling and one of them appeared, blood streaming from a wound in the shoulder.
Chavasse dived for the shelter of a clump of reeds and dropped on his face as heavy bodies crashed through the mud. There was a cry of dismay, a shot was fired and someone screamed. When he raised his head, he saw an old bull lurch out of the rain, one of the Chinese men hanging across his head, impaled on the right horn. The bull shook the man free and started to trample him.
There were two more shots somewhere in the mist and then a terrible cry. Chavasse had heard enough. He moved out of the reeds quickly and took to the water. A few moments later, he reached another patch of dry land, checked his compass and started to move southwest toward Hellgate.
IT took him the best part of an hour to reach the vantage point from which he and Darcy had viewed the house that morning. He crouched in the reeds and peered across the lagoon. If anything, the mist had thickened and everything was indistinct, ghostlike, more than ever a sad Russian landscape.
By now L’Alouette would be tied up at the landing stage on the other side of the island at the rear of the house, and if anything was to be done, it would have to be from here.
To his left, reeds marched out into the gray water, providing plenty of cover for perhaps half of the distance. The final approach would be in the open—no other way.
He was still wearing the nylon waders Malik had provided, and now he sat down and pulled them off. Underneath he was wearing a pair of slacks so wet that they clung to him like a second skin. He moved round toward the line of reeds and waded into the water, crouching low. For the first time since his jump for freedom on L’Alouette, he felt cold—really cold—and shivered uncontrollably as the water rose higher. And then his feet lost touch with the bottom and he started to swim.
He paused at the extreme end of the reeds and trod water. There were about fifty yards of clear water left to cover. He took a couple of deep breaths, sank under the surface and started to swim. When he sounded for air, he was halfway there. He surfaced as gently as possible, turned on his back to rest for a brief moment, then went under again.
In a very short time, his body scraped the black mud off the bottom as he neared the island. He came to the surface and floundered ashore into the shelter of a line of bushes.
He crouched there in the rain, sobbing for breath, then got to his feet and moved on cautiously through the derelict garden to the house. There was no sound, not a sign of life—nothing, and a strange kind of panic touched him. What if they had left? What if Rossiter had decided to get out while the going was good? And then Famia Nadeem appeared at the end of the overgrown path he was following.
SHE wore rubber boots to the knees and an old naval duffle coat, the hood pulled up. She was the same and yet not the same, in some strange way a different person. She walked on, hands thrust into the pockets of her duffle coat, face serious. Chavasse waited till she was abreast of him, then reached out from the bushes and touched her shoulder.
Her expression was something to see. The eyes widened, the mouth opened as if she would cry out, and then she took a deep shuddering breath.
“I couldn’t believe it when Rossiter said you were alive.”
“He’s here? You’ve seen him?”
She nodded. “They came back in the other boat about an hour ago with Mr. Jones, though he isn’t Mr. Jones anymore, is he?”
Chavasse put a hand on her shoulder. “How bad has it been?”
“Bad?” She seemed almost surprised. “That’s a relative term, I guess. But we mustn’t stand here talking like this. You’ll get pneumonia. Through those trees is a derelict summer house. Wait there. I’ll bring some dry clothes, and then we’ll decide what’s to be done.”
She faded like a ghost and he stood, watching her through the quiet rain, conscious of the stillness, drained of all strength. God knew what Rossiter had done to her, but she had been used harshly, must have been for such a profound change to have occurred so quickly.
The summer house reminded him of childhood. The roof leaked and half the floorboards were missing and he slumped down against the wall underneath the gaping window. He used to play in just such a place a thousand years ago.
He closed his eyes, tiredness flooding over him, and a board creaked. When he looked up, Rossiter stood in the doorway, Famia at his side.
Her face was calm, completely impassive, pure as a painting of a medieval Madonna.
The cellar into which two more Chinese guards pushed him was so dark that he had to pause for a couple of moments after the door was closed, waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom.
“Darcy, are you there?” he called softly.
“Over here, Paul.” There was a movement in the darkness and Chavasse reached out.
“What happened when I jumped the boat? Are you all right?”
“A knock on the head, that’s all. What about you? I thought you’d be long gone.”
Chavasse told him. When he had finished, the Jamaican sighed. “He certainly must have got through to that girl.”
Chavasse nodded. “It doesn’t make sense. She knows what happened on the Leopard. How can she possibly believe anything he says?”
“There could be a very simple explanation,” Darcy pointed out.
“She’s fallen in love with him, you mean?”
“Could be more than that. Might be one of those strong sexual attractions that some people have for each other. It’s possible.”
“I suppose so. Immaterial now, anyway.” Chavasse moved through the darkness, hand outstretched until he touched the wall. “Have you explored?”
“Not really. I was still unconscious when they first dumped me in here.”
Chavasse moved along the wall, feeling his way cautiously. He touched some kind of flat board, felt for the edge and pulled. It came away with a splintering crash and light flooded in.
The window was barred, the glass long since disappeared. It was at ground level and the view was confined to a section of what had once been the lawn stretching down to the landing stage that Chavasse had been unable to see from the other side of the island.
The landing stage had definitely seen better days and half of it had decayed into the lagoon. The rest was occupied by a forty-foot seagoing launch that had obviously once been a motor torpedo boat and L’Alouette.
Four men passed by, carrying boxes between them, and went toward the launch. They certainly weren’t Chinese, and
Chavasse strained forward and managed to catch the odd word as they passed by.
“Albanian,” he whispered to Darcy. “Which makes sense. Remember the incident on L’Alouette when Ho Tsen took a swing at Rossiter? He told him he’d have a lot to answer for when they reached Tirana.”
“The only European Communist nation to ally itself with Red China rather than Russia. It certainly explains a great deal.”
The men from the launch returned. A few minutes later, they reappeared, carrying a couple of heavy traveling trunks. “Looks as if somebody is moving house,” Darcy commented.
Chavasse nodded. “Destination Albania. They’ve got to get out, now that we’ve been nosing around. They’ve no guarantee that others won’t follow.”
“But why keep us in one piece?” Darcy said. “I wouldn’t have thought they’d want excess baggage.”
“But we aren’t. I’ve had dealings with the Albanians before, and the Chinese. They’d love to have me back. And you might be useful, too. They can’t tell until they’ve squeezed you dry.”
The bolt rattled in the door, it opened and the two Chinese men appeared. One of them held a machine pistol threateningly, the other came forward, grabbed Chavasse and pushed him roughly outside. They locked the door and shoved him along the corridor.
They passed through a large entrance hall, mounted a flight of uncarpeted stairs and knocked on the first door. It was opened, after a slight delay, by Rossiter who was wearing a dressing gown. He looked as if he had just pulled it on and was certainly naked to the waist. He tightened the cord and nodded.
“Bring him in.”
Beyond him another door stood open and Chavasse caught a glimpse of a bed, the covers ruffled and Famia stepping into her skirt in front of a mirror. Rossister closed the door and turned.
“You do keep popping up, don’t you? Of course, now we know what you are, it isn’t really surprising.”
“What’s happened to the man from Peking?” Chavasse asked. “Doesn’t he want to put his two cents’ worth in?”