Wyatt's Hurricane / Bahama Crisis

by Desmond Bagley

  He turned his head. ‘More of them coming in.’ He turned back to watch. There were seven of them this time, six troopers and what seemed to be an officer, and there was discipline in the way they moved into the foyer and looked about. The officer stared across into the bar and shouted something, but his voice was lost in the uproar, so he drew his revolver and fired a shot in the air. There came sudden silence in the hotel.

  Mrs Warmington stirred weakly and a bubbling groan came from her lips. Julie clamped her hand across the woman’s mouth and squeezed tight. She heard an exasperated sigh from Rawsthorne and saw him move his head slightly as though he had taken one quick look back.

  The officer shouted in a hectoring voice and one by one the deserters drifted out of the bar and into the foyer and stood muttering among themselves, eyeing the officer insolently and in defiance. The last to appear was the soldier with the rifle—he was very drunk.

  The officer whiplashed them with his tongue, his voice cracking in rage. Then he made a curt gesture and gave a quick command, indicating that they should line up. The drunken soldier with the rifle shouted something and unslung the weapon from his shoulder, cocking it as he did so, and the officer snapped an order to the trooper standing at his back. The trooper lifted his submachine-gun and squeezed the trigger. The stuttering hammer of the gun filled the foyer with sound and a spray of bullets took the rifleman across the chest and flung him backwards across a table, which collapsed with a crash.

  A stray bullet slammed into the door near Rawsthorne’s head and he flinched, but he kept his eye on the foyer and saw the officer wave his arm tiredly. Obediently the deserters lined up and marched out of the hotel, escorted by the armed troopers. The officer put his revolver back into its holster and looked down at the man who had been killed. Viciously he kicked the body, then turned on his heel and walked out.

  Rawsthorne waited a full five minutes before he said cautiously, ‘I think we can go out now.’

  As he pushed open the door and light flooded into the store-room Julie released her grip of Mrs Warmington, who sagged sideways on to Eumenides. Rawsthorne stumbled out and Julie followed, then they turned to drag out the older woman. ‘How is she?’ asked Julie. ‘I thought I would suffocate her, but I had to keep her quiet.’

  Rawsthorne bent over her. ‘She’ll be all right.’

  It was twenty minutes before they were in the car and ready to go. Mrs Warmington was conscious but in a daze, hardly aware of what was happening. Eumenides was white and shaken. As he settled himself in the car seat he discovered a long tear in his jacket just under the left sleeve, and realized with belated terror that he had nearly been shot through the heart by the stray bullet that had frightened Rawsthorne.

  Rawsthorne checked the instruments. ‘She’s full up with petrol,’ he said. ‘And there are a couple of spare cans in the back. We should be all right.’

  He started off and the car rolled down the narrow alley at the back of the hotel heading towards the main street. The Union Jack mounted on the wing of the car fluttered a little in the breeze of their passage.

  It was a quarter to two.

  III

  When Causton stepped out into the street he had felt very conspicuous as though accusing eyes were upon him from every direction, but after a while he began to feel easier as he realized that the people round him were intent only on their own troubles. Looking up the crowded street towards the Place de la Libération Noire he saw a coil of black smoke indicating a fire, and even as he watched he saw a shell burst in what must have been the very centre of the square.

  He turned and began to hurry the other way, going with the general drift. The noise was pandemonium—the thunder of the guns, the wail of shells screaming through the air and the ear-splitting blasts as they exploded were bad enough, but the noise of the crowd was worse. Everyone seemed to find it necessary to shout, and the fact that they were shouting in what, to him, was an unknown language did not help.

  Once a man grasped him by the arm and bawled a string of gibberish into his face and Causton said, ‘Sorry, old boy, but I can’t tell a word you’re saying,’ and threw the arm off. It was only when he turned away that he realized that he himself had shouted at the top of his voice.

  The crowd was mainly civilian although there were a lot of soldiers, some armed but mostly not. The majority of the soldiers seemed to be unwounded and quite fit apart from their weariness and the glazed terror in their eyes, and Causton judged that these were men who had faced an artillery barrage for the first time in their lives and had broken under it. But there were wounded men, trudging along holding broken arms, limping with leg wounds, and one most horrible sight, a young soldier staggering along with his hands to his stomach, the red wetness of his viscera escaping through his slippery fingers.

  The civilians seemed even more demoralized than the soldiery. They ran about hither and thither, apparently at random. One man whom Causton observed changed the direction of his running six times in as many minutes, passing and repassing Causton until he was lost in the crowd. He came upon a young girl in a red dress standing in the middle of the street, her hands clapped to her ears and her prettiness distorted as she screamed endlessly. He heard her screams for quite a long time as he fought his way through that agony of terror.

  He finally decided he had better get into a side street away from the press, so he made his way to the pavement and turned the first corner he came to. It was not so crowded and he could make better time, a point he noted for when the time came to drive out the car. Presently he came upon a young soldier sitting on an orange box, his rifle beside him and one sleeve of his tunic flapping loose. Causton stopped and said, ‘Have you got a broken arm?’

  The young man looked up uncomprehendingly, his face grey with fatigue. Causton tapped his own arm. ‘Le bras,’ he said, then made a swift motion as though breaking a stick across his knee. ‘Broken?’

  The soldier nodded dully.

  ‘I’ll fix it,’ said Causton and squatted down to help the soldier take off his tunic. He kicked the orange box to pieces to make splints and then bound up the arm. ‘You’ll be okay now,’ he said, and departed. But he left bearing the man’s tunic and rifle—he now had his props.

  The tunic was a tight fit so he wore it unbuttoned; the trousers did not match and he had no cap, but he did not think that mattered—all that mattered was that he looked approximately like a soldier and so had a proprietary interest in the war. He lifted the rifle and worked the action to find the magazine empty and smiled thoughtfully. That did not matter, either; he had never shot anyone in his life and did not intend starting now.

  Gradually, by a circuitous route which he carefully marked on the map, he made his way to the eastern edge of the city by the coast road. He was relieved to see that here the crowds were less and the people seemed to be somewhat calmer. Along the road he saw a thin trickle of people moving out, a trickle that later in the day would turn to a flood. The sooner he could get Rawsthorne started in the car, the better it would be for everyone concerned, so he turned back, looking at his watch. It was later than he thought—nearly ten o’clock.

  Now he found he was moving against the stream and progress was more difficult and would become even more so as he approached the disturbed city centre. He looked ahead and saw the blazon of smoke in the sky spreading over the central area—the city was beginning to burn. But not for long, he thought grimly. Not if Wyatt is right.

  He pressed on into the bedlam that was St Pierre, pushing against the bodies that pressed against him and ruthlessly using the butt of his rifle to clear his way. Once he met a soldier fighting his way clear and they came face to face; Causton reversed his rifle and manipulated the bolt with a sharp click, thinking, what do I do if he doesn’t take the hint? The soldier nervously eyed the rifle muzzle pointing at his belly, half-heartedly made an attempt to lift his own gun but thought better of it, and retreated, slipping away into the crowd. Causton grinned mirthlessly and went o
n his way.

  He was not far from the Imperiale when the press of the crowd became so much that he could not move. Christ! he thought; we’re sitting ducks for a shell-burst. He tried to make his way back, but found that as difficult as going forward—something was evidently holding up the crowd, something immovable.

  He found out what it was when he struggled far enough back, almost to the corner of the street. A military unit had debouched from the side street and formed a line across the main thoroughfare, guns pointing at the crowd. Men were being hauled out of the crowd and lined up in a clear space, and Causton took one good look and tried to duck back. But he was too late. An arm shot out and grabbed him, pulling him bodily out of the crowd and thrusting him to join the others. Serrurier was busy rounding up his dissolving army.

  He looked at the group of men which he had joined. They were all soldiers and all unwounded, looking at the ground with hangdog expressions. Causton hunched his shoulders, drooped his head and mingled unobtrusively with them, getting as far away from the front as possible. After a while an officer came and made a speech to them. Causton couldn’t understand a word of it, but he got the general drift of the argument. They were deserters, quitters under fire, who deserved to be shot, if not at dawn, then a damn’ sight sooner. Their only hope of staying alive was to go and face the guns of Favel for the greater glory of San Fernandez and President Serrurier.

  To make his point the officer walked along the front row of men and arbitrarily selected six. They were marched across to the front of a house—poor, bewildered, uncomprehending sheep—and suddenly a machine-gun opened up and the little group staggered and fell apart under the hail of bullets. The officer calmly walked across and put a bullet into the brain of one screaming wretch, then turned and gave a sharp order.

  The deserters were galvanized into action. Under the screams of bellowing non-coms they formed into rough order and marched away down the side street, Causton among them. He looked at the firing squad in the truck as he passed, then across at the six dead bodies. Pour encourager les autres, he thought.

  Causton had been conscripted into Serrurier’s army.

  IV

  Dawson was astonished at himself.

  He had lived his entire life as a civilized member of the North American community and, as a result, he had never come to terms with himself on what he would do if he got into real trouble. Like most modern civilized men, he had never met trouble of this sort; he was cosseted and protected by the community and paid his taxes like a man, so that this protection should endure and others stand between him and primitive realities such as death by bullet or torture.

  Although his image was that of a free-wheeling, all-American he-man and although he was in danger of believing his own press-clippings, he was aware in the dim recesses of his being that this image was fraudulent, and from time to time he had wondered vaguely what kind of a man he really was. He had banished these thoughts as soon as they were consciously formulated because he had an uneasy feeling that he was really a weak man after all, and the thought disturbed him deeply. The public image he had formed was the man he wanted to be and he could not bear the thought that perhaps he was nothing like that. And he had no way of proving it one way or the other—he had never been put to the test.

  Wyatt’s hardly concealed contempt had stung and he felt something approaching shame at his attempt to steal the car—that was not the way a man should behave. So that when his testing-time came something deep inside him made him square his shoulders and briskly tell Sous-Inspecteur Roseau to go to hell and make it damn’ fast, buddy.

  So it was that now, lying in bed with all hell breaking loose around him, he felt astonished at himself. He had stood up to such physical pain as he had never believed possible and he felt proud that his last conscious act in Roseau’s office had been to look across at the implacable face before him and mumble, ‘I still say it—go to hell, you son of a bitch!’

  He had recovered consciousness in a clean bed with his hands bandaged and his wounds tended. Why that should be he did not know, nor did he know why he could not raise his body from the bed. He tried several times and then gave up the effort and turned his attention to his new and wondrous self. In one brief hour he had discovered that he would never need a public image again, that he would never shrink from self-analysis.

  ‘I’ll never be afraid again,’ he whispered aloud through bruised lips. ‘By God, I stood it—I need never be afraid again.’

  But he was afraid again when the artillery barrage opened up. He could not control the primitive reaction of his body; his glands worked normally and fear entered him as the hail of steel fell upon the Place de la Libération Noire. He shrank back on to the bed and looked up at the ceiling and wondered helplessly if the next shell would plunge down to take away his new-found manhood.

  V

  Not far away, Wyatt sat in the corner of his cell with his hands over his ears because the din was indescribably deafening. His face was cut about where broken glass had driven at him, but luckily his eyes were untouched. He had spent some time delicately digging out small slivers of glass from his skin—a very painful process—and the concentration needed had driven everything else out of his mind. But now he was sharply aware of what was going on.

  Every gun Favel had appeared to be firing on the Place de la Libération Noire. Explosion followed explosion without ceasing and an acrid chemical stink drifted through the small window into the cell. The Poste de Police had not yet been hit, or at least Wyatt did not think so. And he was sure he would know. As he crouched in the corner with his legs up, grasshopper fashion, and his face dropped between his knees, he was busy making plans as to what he would do when the Poste was hit—if he still remained alive to do anything at all.

  Suddenly there was an almighty clang that shivered the air in the cell. Wyatt felt like a mouse that had crawled into a big drum—he was completely deafened for a time and heard the tumult outside as though through a hundred layers of cloth. He staggered to his feet, shaking his head dizzily, and leaned against the wall. After a while he felt better and began to look more closely at the small room in which he was imprisoned. The Poste had been hit—that was certain—and surely to God something must have given way.

  He looked at the opposite wall. Surely it had not had that bulge in it before? He went closer to examine it and saw a long crack zigzagging up the wall. He put his hand out and pushed tentatively, and then applied his shoulder and pushed harder. Nothing gave.

  He stepped back and looked around the cell for something with which to attack the wall. He looked at the stool and rejected it—it was lightly built of wood, a good enough weapon against a man but not against the wall. There remained the bed. It was made of iron of the type where the main frame lifts out of sockets in the head and foot. The bed head, of tubular metal, was bolted together, but the bolts had rusted and it was quite a task to withdraw them. However, at the end of half an hour he had a goodly selection of tools with which to work—two primitive crowbars, several scrapers devised from the bed springs and an object which was quite unnameable but for which, no doubt, he could find a use.

  Feeling rather like Edmond Dantes, he knelt before the wall and began to use one of the scrapers to detach loose mortar from the crack. The mortar, centuries old, was hard and ungiving, but the explosion had not done the wall any good and gradually he excavated a small hole, wide enough and deep enough to insert the end of his crowbar. Then he heaved until his muscles cracked and was rewarded with the minutest movement of the stone block which he was attacking.

  He stood back to inspect the problem and became conscious that the intense shellfire directed at the square had ceased. The shell which had cracked the wall must have been one of the last fired in that direction, and all that could be heard now was a generalized battle noise away to the north of the town.

  He dismissed the war from his mind and looked thoughtfully at his improvised crowbar. A crowbar is a lever, or rather, part
of a lever—the other part is a fulcrum, and he had no fulcrum. He took the foot of the bed and placed it against the wall; it could be used as a fulcrum but not in the place he had made the hole. He would have to begin again and make another hole.

  Again it took a long time. Patiently he scraped away at the iron-hard mortar, chipping and picking it to pieces, and when he had finished his knuckles were bruised and bleeding and his fingertips felt as though someone had sand-papered them raw. He was also beginning to suffer from thirst; he had drunk the small carafe of water that had been in the cell, and no one had come near since that last colossal explosion—a good sign.

  He inserted the tip of his crowbar into the new hole and heaved again. Again he felt the infinitesimal shift in the wall. He took the bed foot and placed it within six inches of the wall and then plunged his crowbar into the hole. It rested nicely just on top of the metal frame of the bed. Then he took a deep breath and swung his whole weight on to the crow-bar. Something had to give—the crowbar, the bed, the wall—or—maybe—Wyatt. He hoped it would be the wall.

  He felt the metal tube of the crowbar bending under his weight but still bore down heavily, lifting his feet from the floor. There came a sudden grating noise and a sharp shift in pressure and he found himself abruptly deposited on the floor. He turned over and coughed and waved his hand to disperse the dust which eddied and swirled through the cell illuminated by a bright beam of sunlight which shone through the gaping hole he had made.

  He rested for a few minutes, then went to look at the damage. By his calculations, he should merely have broken through to the next cell and it had been a calculated risk whether he would find the door to that cell locked. But to his surprise, when he looked through the hole he could see, though not very clearly, a part of the square partly obscured by a ragged exterior wall.