The Eye of the Tiger

by Wilbur Smith

  However, the portion that had been buried was protected, and now I examined the remaining lettering more closely.

  wnl “Mere was an extended V or a broken W followed immediately by a perfect “N” - then a gap and a whole V; beyond that the lettering had been obliterated again.

  The coat of arms worked into the metal on the opposite side of the barrel was an intricate design with two rampant beasts - probably lions - supporting a shield and a mailed head. It seemed vaguely familiar, and I wondered where I had seen it before.

  I rocked back on my heels and looked at Sherry North. She was unable to meet my gaze.

  “Funny thing,” I mused. “A jet aircraft with a bloody great brass bell hanging on its nose.”

  “I don’t understand it,” she said.

  “No more do I. I stood up and went to get a cheroot from the saloon. I lit it and sat back in the fighting chair. “Okay. Let’s hear your theory.”

  “I don’t know, Harry. Truly I don’t.”

  “Let’s try some guesses,” I suggested. “I’ll begin.” She turned away to the rail.

  “The jet aircraft turned into a pumpkin,” I hazarded. “How about that one?”

  She turned back to me. “Harry, I don’t feel well. I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “So, what must I do?”

  “Let’s go back now.”

  “I was thinking of another dive - look around a bit more.” “No,” she said quickly. “Please, not now. I don’t feel up to it.

  Let’s go. We can come back if we have to.”

  I studied her face for evidence of her sickness: she looked like an advert for health food.

  “All right,” I agreed; there was not really much point in another dive, but only I knew that. “Let’s go home and try and work it out.”

  I stood up and began rewrapping the brass bell.

  What are you going to do with that?” she asked anxiously.

  “Redeposit it,” I told her. “I am certainly not going to take it back to St. Mary’s and display it in the market place. Like you said, we can always come back.”

  “Yes,” she agreed immediately. “You are right, of course.”

  I dropped the package over the side once more and went to haul the hook.

  On the homeward run I found Sherry North’s presence on the bridge irritated me. There was a lot of hard thinking I had to do. I sent her down to make coffee.

  “Strong,” I told her, “and with four spoons of sugar. It will be good for your seasickness.”

  She reappeared on the bridge within two minutes. “The stove won’t light,“she complained.

  “You have to open the main gas cylinders first.” I explained where to find the taps. “And don’t forget to close them when you finish, or you’ll turn the boat into a bomb.” She made lousy coffee.

  It was late evening when I picked up moorings in Grand Harbour, and dark by the time I dropped Sherry at the entrance of the hotel. She didn’t even invite me in for a drink, but kissed me on the cheek and said, “Darling, let me be alone tonight. I am exhausted. I am going to bed now. Let me think about all this, and when I feel better we can plan more clearly.”

  “I’ll pick you up here - what time?” “No,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the boat. Early. Eight o’clock. Wait for me there - we can talk in private. just the two of us, no one else - all right?”

  “I’ll bring Dancer to the wharf at eight,” I promised her.

  It had been a thirsty day, and on the way home I stopped off at the Lord Nelson.

  Angelo and Judith were with a noisy party of their own age in one of the booths. They called me over and made room for me between two of the girls.

  I brought them each a pint, and Angelo leaned over confidentially.

  “Hey, skipper, are you using the pick-up tonight?” “Yes,” I said. “To get me home.” I knew what was coming, of course. Angelo acted. as though he had shares in the vehicle.

  “There’s a big party down at South Point tonight, boss,” suddenly he was very free with the “boss” and “skipper’, “I thought if I run you out to Turtle Bay, then you’d let us have the truck. I’d pick you up early tomorrow, promise.”

  I took a swallow at my tankard and they were all watching me with eager hopeful faces.

  “It’s a big party, Mister Harry,” said Judith. “Please.”

  “You pick me up seven o’clock sharp, Angelo, hear?” and there was a spontaneous burst of relieved laughter. They clubbed in to buy me another pint.

  I had a disturbed night, with restless sleep interspersed with periods of wakefulness. I had the dream again, when I dived to the canvas package. Once more it contained a tiny Dresden mermaid, but this time she had Sherry North’s face and she offered me the model of a jet fighter aircraft that changed into a golden pumpkin as I reached for it. The pumpkin was etched with the letters: wnl It rained after midnight, solid sheets of water, that poured off the eaves, and the lightning silhouetted the palm fronds against the night sky.

  It was still raining when I went down to the beach, and the heavy drops exploded in minute bomb bursts of spray upon my naked body. The sea was black in the bad light, and the rain squalls reached to the horizon. I swam alone, far out beyond the reef, but when I came back to the beach the excursion had not provided the usual lift to my spirits.

  My body was blue and shivering with the cold, and a vague but pervading sense of trouble and depression pressed heavily upon me, I had finished breakfast when the pick-up came down the track through the palm plantation, splashing through the puddles, splattered with mud and with headlights still burning.

  In the yard Angelo hooted and shouted, “You ready, Harry?” and I ran out with a souwester held over my head. Angelo smelled of beer and he was garrulous and slightly bleary of eye.

  I’ll drive,” I told him, and as we crossed the island he gave me a blow-by-blow description of the great party from what he told me it seemed there might be an epidemic of births on St. Mary’s in nine months” time.

  I was only half listening to him, for as we approached the town so my sense of disquiet mounted.

  “Hey, Harry, the kids said to thank you for the loan of the pick-up.”

  “That’s okay, Angelo!

  “I sent Judith out to the boat - she’s going to tidy up, Harry, and get the coffee going for you.”

  “She shouldn’t have worried,” I said.

  “She wanted to do that specially - sort of thank you, you know.”

  “She’s a good girl.”

  “Sure is, Harry. I love that girl,” and Angelo burst into song, “Devil Woman” in the style of Mick Jagger.

  When we crossed the ridge and started down into the valley I had a sudden impulse. Instead of continuing straight down Frobisher Street to the harbour, I swung left on to the circular drive above the fort and hospital and went up the avenue of banyan trees to the Hilton Hotel. I parked the pick-up under the canopy and went through to the reception lobby.

  There was nobody behind the desk this early in the morning, but I leaned across the counter and peered into Marion’s cubicle. She was at her switchboard and when she saw me her face lit up in a wide grin and she lifted off her earphones.

  “Hello, Mister Harry.”

  “Hello, Marion, love,” I returned the grin. “Is Miss. North in her room?”

  Her expression changed. “Oh no,” she said, “she left over an hour ago.”

  “Left?” I stared at her.

  “Yes. She went out to the airport with the hotel bus. She was catching the seven-thirty plane.” Marion glanced at the cheap Japanese watch on her wrist. “They would have taken off ten minutes ago.”

  I was taken completely off-balance, of all things I had least expected this. It didn’t make sense for many seconds and then suddenly and sickeningly it did.

  “Oh Jesus Christ,” I said. “Judith!” and I ran for the pickup.

  Angelo saw my face as I came and he sat up straight in the seat and stopped sin
ging.

  I jumped into the driver’s seat and started the engine, thrusting the pedal down hard and swinging in a roaring two-wheeled turn.

  “What is it, Harry?” Angelo demanded.

  “Judith?” I asked grimly. “You sent her down to the boat, when?”

  “When I left to fetch you.”

  “Did she go right away?”

  “No, she’d have to bath and dress first.” He was telling it straight, not hiding the fact they had slept together. He sensed the urgency of the situation. “Then she’d have to walk down the valley from the farm.” Angelo had lodgings with a peasant family up near the spring, it was a threemile walk.

  “God, let us be in time,” I whispered. The truck was bellowing down the avenue, and I hit the gears in a racing change as we went out through the gates in a screaming broadside, and I slammed down hard again on the accelerator, pulling her out of the skid by main strength.

  “What the hell is it, Harry?” he demanded once again. “We’ve got to stop her going aboard Dancer,” I told him grimly as we roared down the circular drive above the town. Past the fort a vista of Grand Harbour opened beneath us. He did not waste time with inane questions. We had worked together too long for that and if I said so then he accepted it as so.

  Dancer was still at her moorings amongst the other island craft, and halfway out to her from the wharf Judith was rowing the dinghy. Even at this distance I could make out the tiny feminine figure on the thwart, and recognize the short businesslike oar-strokes. She was an island girl, and rowed like a man.

  “We aren’t going to make it,” said Angelo. “She’ll get there before we reach Admiralty.”

  At the top of Frobisher Street I put the heel of my left hand on the horn ring, and blowing a continuous blast I tried to clear the road. But it was a Saturday morning, market day, and already the streets were filling. The country folk had come to town in their bullocks, carts and ancient jalopies. Cursing with a terrible frustration, I hooted and forced my way through them.

  It took us three minutes to cover the half mile from the top of the street down to Admiralty Wharf

  “Oh God,” I said, leaning forward in the seat as I shot through the mesh gates, and crossed the railway tracks.

  The dinghy was tied up alongside Wave Dancer, and Judith was climbing over the side. She wore an emerald green shirt and short denim pants. Her hair was in a long braid down her back.

  I skidded the truck to a halt beside the pineapple sheds, and both Angelo and I hit the wharf at a run.

  “Judith!” I yelled, but my voice did not carry out across the harbour.

  Without looking back, Judith disappeared into the saloon. Angelo and I raced down to the end of the jetty. Both of us were screaming wildly, but the wind was in our faces and Dancer was five hundred yards out across the water.

  “There’s a dinghy!” Angelo caught my arm. It was an ancient clinker-built mackerel boat, but it was chained to a ring in the stone wharf.

  We jumped into it, leaping the eight foot drop and falling in a heap together over the thwart. I scrambled to the mooring chain. It had quarter-inch galvanized steel links, and a heavy brass padlock secured it to the ring.

  I took two twists of chain around my wrist, braced one foot against the wharf and heaved. The padlock exploded, and I fell backwards into the bottom of the dinghy.

  Angelo already had the oars in the rowtocks. “Row,” I shouted at’him. “Row like a mad bastard.”

  I was in the bows cupping my hands to my mouth as I hailed Judith, trying to make my voice carry above the wind.

  Angelo was rowing in a dedicated frenzy, swinging the oar blades flat and low on the back reach and then throwing his weight upon them when they bit. His breathing exploded in a harsh grunt at each stroke.

  Halfway out to Dancer another rain squall enveloped us, shrouding the whole of Grand Harbour in eddying sheets of grey water. It stung my face, so I had to screw up my eyes.

  Dancer’s outline was blurred by grey rain, but we were coming close now. I was beginning to hope that Judith would sweep and tidy the cabins before she struck a match to the gas ring in the galley. I was also beginning to hope that I was wrong - that Sherry North had not left a farewell present for me.

  Yet still I could hear my own voice speaking to Sherry North the previous day. “You have to open the main gas cylinders first - and don’t forget to close them when you finish, or youtil turn the boat into a bomb.” Closer still we came to Dancer and she seemed to hang on tendrils of rain, ghostly white and insubstantial in the swirling mist.

  “Judith,” I shouted, she must hear me now - we were that close.

  There were two fifty-pound cylinders of Butane gas on board, enough to destroy a large brick-built house. The gas was heavier than air, once it escaped it would slump down, filling Dancer’s hull with a murderously explosive mixture of gas and air. It needed just one spark from battery or match.

  I prayed that I was wrong and yelled again. Then suddenly Dancer blew.

  It was dash explosion, a fearsome blue light that shot through her. It split her hull with a mighty hammer stroke, and blew her superstructure open, lifting it like a lid.

  Dancer reared to the mortal blow, and the blast hit us like a storm wind. Immediately I smelled the electric stench of the blast, acrid as an air-sizzling strike of lightning against iron-stone.

  Dancer died as I watched, a terrible violent death, and then her torn and lifeless hull fell back and the cold grey waters rushed into her. The heavy engines pulled her swiftly down, and she was gone into the grey waters of Grand Harbour.

  Angelo and I were frozen with horror, crouching in the violently rocking dinghy, staring at the agitated water that was strewn with loose wreckage - all that remained of a beautiful boat and a lovely young girl. I felt a vast desolation descend upon me, I wanted to cry aloud in my anguish, but I was paralysed.

  Angelo moved first. He leapt upright with a sound in his throat like a wounded beast. He tried to throw himself over the side, but I caught and held him.

  “Leave me,“he screamed. “I must go to her.”

  “No.” I fought with him in the crazily rocking dinghy. “It’s no good, Angelo.”

  Even if he could get down through the forty feet of water in which Dancer’s torn hull now lay, what he would find might drive him mad. Judith had stood at the centre of that blast, and she would have been subjected to all the terrible trauma of massive flash explosion at close range.

  “Leave me, damn you.” Angelo got one arm free and hit me in the face, but I saw it coming and rolled my head. It grazed the skin from my cheek, and I knew I had to get him quieted down.

  The dinghy was on the point of capsizing. Though he was forty pounds lighter than me, Angelo fought with maniac strength. He was calling her name now..

  “Judith, Judith,” an an hysterical rising inflection. I released my grip on his shoulder with my right hand, and swung him slightly away from me, lining him up carefully. I hit him with a right chop, my fist moving not more than four inches. I hit him cleanly on the point below his left ear, and he dropped instantly, gone cold. I lowered him to the floorboards and laid him outcomfortably. I rowed back to the wharf without looking back. I felt completely numbed and drained.

  I carried Angelo down the wharf and I hardly felt his weight in my arms. I drove him up to the hospital and Macnab was on duty.

  “Give him something to keep him muzzy and in bed for the next twenty-four hours,” I told Macnab, and he began to argue.

  “Listen, you broken-down old whisky vat,” I told him quietly, “I’d love an excuse to beat your head in.”

  He paled until the broken veins in his nose and cheeks stood out boldly.

  “Now listen - Harry old man,” he began. I took a step towards him, and he sent the duty sister to the drug cupboard.

  I found Chubby at breakfast and it took only a minute to explain what had happened. We went up to the fort in the pick-up, and Wally Andrews responded quickl
y. He waived the filing of statements and other police procedure and instead we piled the police diving equipment into the truck and by the time we reached the harbour, half of St. Mary’s had formed a silent worried crowd along the wharf. Some had seen it and all of them had heard the explosion.

  An occasional voice called condolences to me as we carried the diving equipment to the mackerel boat. “Somebody find Fred Coker,” I told them. “Tell him to get down here with a bag and basket,” and there was a buzz of comment.

  “Hey, Mister Harry, was there somebody aboard?”

  “Just get Fred Coker,” I told them, and we rowed out to Dancer’s moorings.

  While Wally kept the dinghy on station above us, Chubby and I went down through the murky harbour water. Dancer lay on her back in forty-five feet, she must have rolled as she sank - but there was no need to worry about access to her interior, for her hull had been torn open along the keel. She was far past any hope of refloating.

  Chubby waited at the hole in the hull while I went in. What remained of the galley was filled with swirling excited shoals of fish. They were in a feeding frenzy and I choked and gagged into the mouthpiece of my scuba when I saw what they were feeding upon.

  The only way I knew it was Judith was the tatters of green cloth clinging to the fragments of flesh. We got her out in three main pieces, and placed her in the canvas bag that Fred Coker provided.

  I dived again immediately, and worked my way through the shattered hull to the compartment below the galley where the two long iron gas cylinders were still bolted to their beds. Both taps were wide open, and somebody had disconnected the hoses to allow the gas to escape freely.

  I have never experienced anger so intense as I felt then. It was that strong for it fed upon my loss. Dancer was gone - and Dancer had been half my life. I closed the taps and reconnected the gas hose. It was a private thing - I would deal with it personally.

  When I walked back along the wharf to the pick-up, all that gave me comfort was the knowledge that Dancer had been insured. There would be another boat - not as beautiful or as well beloved as Dancer - but a boat nevertheless.

  In the crowd I noticed the shiny black face of Harnbone Williams - the harbour ferryman. For forty years he had plied his old dinghy back and forth at threepence a hire.