Bluebolt One

by Philip McCutchan

  She said, “A gentleman that’s been waiting for you in sister’s sitting-room. A Mr Latymer.”

  “You’d better bring him in right away, please, Nurse. It’s important, and there’s—things—I’ve got to talk to him about.”

  Latymer had a way with him, Shaw decided with amusement, there was no doubt about that. The nurse had seemed to want to stay in the room, but the Old Man had simply opened the door and glared at her, then barked at her not to come back unless she was sent for. She’d given that scarred, square face and the steel-green eyes just one astonished look and then she’d gone without another word, and Latymer, grinning away and dusting his hands together, had marched over to the bed. He came straight to the point. He said abruptly, “Well, my boy. Damned glad we got there in time.

  Now—tell me exactly how you’re feeling. And I want the truth.”

  Shaw said, “Better than I ever thought I would, sir. All things considered, I think I’m fairly fit.”

  “Good.” The eyes examined him critically, brows thickly lowered. “Now—give me the whole story from top to bottom and in detail.”

  Latymer listened intently and in silence for the most part, only asking a brief and pointed question here and there. When Shaw had finished he said harshly, “They’ll have got a flying start. Clear away by this time, I shouldn’t wonder. There’s already a warrent out for Canasset, and a full-scale search is on for the girl. The ports and airfields had a watch put on ’em as soon as we could arrange it—”

  “When was that, sir?”

  “Not till Canasset had had that good start, unfortunately. You see, there wasn’t anything to incriminate him personally at first so far as we knew—and his wife put us off with some yarn that he’d gone down to Plymouth for the week-end. She sounded as though she genuinely believed that, and Verity’s story tied up too at first. Anyhow, I had a check made on friend Canasset. The results were perfectly all right to begin with, but then later on some information came to hand that he was known to have Communist sympathies, for what that’s worth, and when we couldn’t find him in Plymouth—well, we went into action. By the way, I didn’t tell you when you mentioned it—we did get confirmation that the body in the pit was definitely MacNamara’s. So that settled him, poor feller—we cancelled the call for him right away. Pity, as it happens... if the call had still been out for him, we might’ve netted this whatsisname, Wiley, instead.” Shaw said, “I can’t understand why MacNamara was down there. You remember I said Wiley’s idea was for my death and Pelly’s to look natural. Well, MacNamara’s was obviously anything but that, and it’d have been suspicious just to find him there, I’d have thought. . . unless. . . .” He hesitated, thinking back to the pit.

  Latymer moved impatiently. “Yes?”

  “Well, I suppose he could have . . . floated in from somewhere else. Freed in some way, perhaps by the tidal movements. Could be that.” He added, “By the way, sir, have the police had any luck in finding Jiddle’s killers?”

  Latymer shook his head. “They haven’t found a thing, I’m afraid. Well—now we’ll have to put out a call for this other black feller, Sam Wiley.” He swung away, walked up and down, hands clasped behind his thick back. He said. “I’d say it’s already a damn sight too late, though. Anyway, our net’s not all that foolproof even when we’re in time.”

  “Where d’you think they’ll have made for, sir?”

  “Africa—of course! Once they get there, we’ll have one hell of a job to pick them up, and you can bet they know it too. And there’s any amount of ways into Nogolia without being spotted—boats from ships lying off uninhabited strips of coast, planes landing up-country on the empty plateaux. . . .”

  “Has the news got out that I’m alive, sir?”

  “If it hasn’t already it soon will.”

  “Have you heard from Debonnair, by the way—I mean, she’ll be worried if she thinks I’m—”

  Latymer interrupted, “Yes, I have, and she’s in the picture.

  That girl loves you, you know—” He broke off and looked down at him shrewdly. “Look here, Shaw. I want you to be quite honest and tell me when you’re fit to go, to move out of here and take a trip, that is. To hell with the doctors. You’re the best judge of how you feel, and they’ve already assured me there’s nothing basically wrong with you. Well?”

  “I’m ready when you are, sir.”

  Latymer put a large hand on his shoulder. “Good for you, my boy,” he said quietly. “But I do want you really fit. You’ll need to be. Have your sleep out for now, leave things to me meanwhile—stay here one more day and night, and then be ready to leave immediately after breakfast the next day. Report direct to Carberry. There’ll be some routine briefing, and then you’ll leave by air for Jinda via Paris, using a routine flight from there. I’ll want you to get up from Jinda to Manalati as unobtrusively as possible. Play this on your own for a while, and deal direct with the two top men at the station—Geisler and Hartog, who will have been warned to expect you. There’s one more thing, Shaw. Remember I spoke of the possibility that Edo might try to get at the Bluebolt station direct, if the indirect methods fail... well, the riots and so on aren’t making any headway against old Tshemambi—he’s sticking like a leech. That’s fine so far as it goes—but it does make me think something worse might happen, so just bear that in mind. I want you to sound the Bluebolt people out along those lines.”

  Some thirty-six hours later Shaw, with a grip that Thompson had packed for him round in the Gliddon Road flat, left the Admiralty by car. One of the things somewhat on his mind was the report he had read some days before in those security screening records about Hartog having been in Russia after liberation from the Nazi concentration camp, and the fact that Hartog never spoke of this period of his life. That could mean anything or nothing, of course, and it might be a long shot to suggest that there was any connexion with current events. Certainly Carberry had seemed convinced there was nothing in it, and he generally had everything at his fingertips. . . .

  Thompson drove him fast to a Royal Air Force station where he boarded a specially chartered civilian plane for Paris, where he would change on to an Air France jet for Jinda.

  Three days earlier Canasset, in the name of Peters, had arrived in Madrid by air and had gone directly to a certain bar where he contacted Sam Wiley, who, with Gillian Ross, had made his way to the Spanish capital independently and by certain devious and well-prepared escape routes. In this bar they had a long interview with a diplomat who, had the Spanish authorities known he was there, would have been decidedly non persona grata. In the course of this interview Wiley was given his final instructions. Afterwards Canasset, his job concluded, began a long journey into Eastern Europe; Wiley and the girl got into a car and were driven at speed to a remote field some distance south of Madrid, where, in the gathering darkness, they boarded an aircraft which took off without delay. Soon after they landed at an airfield in the Sahara, south of Oran, where they changed planes, boarding a waiting jet in which they were the only passengers. This jet took off for Nogolia. It was still dark when they crossed the border and flew low over country covered with thick, close-growing jungle and ranges of hills. When they reached the high ground the pilot circled over a wide plateau, a natural landing-ground. After his second circuit he switched off his navigation lights three times in quick succession, and then a line of flaring torches were seen flickering beneath. Recognizing his runway lights, the pilot took his plane down to a neat landing.

  Wiley and the girl, leaving the plane, were approached by an African who treated Wiley with tremendous respect and a kind of awe, and they were led down from the plateau towards a mountain roadway where they got into a big Cadillac saloon.

  The African nodded at the driver, and the car went off at high speed towards the seaport and capital city of Jinda.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Above, the sky was a burning blue, a shimmering sky with its horizon hardening to a dull bronze. From almost overhead
and seeming very near the sun blazed down, a huge fiery ball glinting and flashing like some giant metal reflector. Below was the thick cloud layer, with occasional gaps through which Shaw could glimpse the dark green jungle-line which seemed to go on for ever and ever, endlessly, a fitted carpet laid thick and lush across all the world, interlaced with the brown, snake-like twists of rivers.

  Shaw looked down intently whenever his eye caught one of those gaps in the cloud’s blanket.

  Somewhere, anywhere, down there Gillian Ross might be by now, suffering mentally and physically. Shaw grew cold at the thought... soon the jet circled to land at Jinda’s big, modem airport two miles outside the city itself. As they came lower and lower Shaw could see the tall, almost skyscraperish buildings lancing upward through low cloud this was an Africa he himself had never known on his previous brief visits, a progressive land, an age-old but at the same time a young and vigorous land, a land which could and would go far if only she was left to settle her own problems and not become a pawn between the Power blocs of the East and the West. Even now it needn’t necessarily be too late. . . .

  There had been changes in Africa, but one thing was the same, Shaw found. As the doors were opened after the plane had touched down and taxied to the apron, the characteristic smell of Africa came into his nostrils, a smell which he hadn’t forgotten over the years. . . it was a different part of Africa which he’d known in the old days, but that smell was the same. It was an unnamable, indefinable smell but an unmistakable one, and a nostalgic one too, and it brought back instantly a vision of Sierra Leone, of sluggish brown waters and reddish earth, of chattering, half-naked happy children besieging the shore-bound sailors of the British Fleet as they landed at Freetown’s Government Wharf or at King Tom Pier. It brought back an image of grey, weather-scarred British warships lying with awnings spread at their moorings out in the bay; of the Victorian architecture and furnishings of the old Creole buildings in the town, and the women parading in the park on Sundays dressed like Victorian ladies, with coal-black smiling faces, regal in their incongruous grandeur; of winding roadways climbing through jungle on the way up to Hill Station above Lumley; of golden days on Lumley Beach itself, swimming in water unbelievably blue and keeping an eye open for the barracuda which lived in it; of days when with sudden vicious fury a squall would strike that bright blue water and turn it within seconds to a wind-lashed froth of raging, muddy brown which was unsafe even for a cruiser’s motor-cutter to cross. But it also brought the other things, the vague suggestion of the ancient pagan past, a hint of the dark secrets of those jungle lands and the closed tribal villages where the word of the ju-ju man was the only law they knew, the areas where Wiley would most probably have hidden and taken the girl.

  As he came through the immigration control, where even his papers were given an exhaustive check which told him that Tshemambi’s Government officials were taking no avoidable chances, the rains, which had been temporarily stilled, broke out again accompanied by a long roll of thunder. As Shaw made for the local airline office to book for Manalati the whole place grew dark, and within seconds the solid water was slicing, battering down again from a leaden sky, bouncing on the roof of the airport building with a sound like a million riveters, and outside the river of water gathered, to rush down a shallow slope to the roadway in a brownish torrent.

  At the airline office Shaw asked for a seat on the next flight up to Manalati.

  The African clerk shook his head. “There will be no flights to Manalati for maybe two days, maybe longer. The rains have broken with unusual violence, and the runway is unserviceable for passenger aircraft.” The man’s singsong tone seemed positively cheerful about it. “Meanwhile, we are taking provisional bookings only.”

  Shaw said, “I can’t wait two days. What’s the alternative?” The clerk shrugged, delving at his nails with a fils. Shaw fumed. He guessed that if only he could pull some strings he’d get some sort of plane to Manalati. But, as usual in his job, it would be wiser if his visit was not unduly advertised by his travelling so openly as any kind of V.I.P. when so near the actual job. He repeated his question.

  “There is a train from Jinda,” the clerk told him. “It will be nearly empty. Few people go to Manalati in the rains. Or you may go by road, but I do not advise this.”

  “I see. How do I get to the station—and what time does the train go?”

  “We are an airline agency, not a railway booking-office.”

  “But—”

  The African slammed down his window and disappeared. Shaw seethed, then swung sharply away. Outside the airport he saw a line of American-style taxis, and he went out and got one to take him into Jinda. He was driven along red-muddy roads through crummy, clapboard suburbs where men lolled in the doorways of dirty bars and cafes, and occasionally, despite the rain, stood in groups at street corners, sometimes jeering and waving clenched fists when they saw the white man in the taxi. Some of them started a low moaning noise, a deep growling mutter which spread along the way to be taken up by gangs of youths farther along. It was the unstemmable voice of Africa, the voice that was saying to the white man: Go—and if you can go in time, go in peace also, for if you overstay your welcome by one hour, you will go in riot and rape and blood. . . .

  Shaw was glad when they came into the modern, Western-built sector of the city, past tall white buildings, offices and shops and hotels, and then arrived at the railway station.

  Going to the booking-office he bought his ticket for Manalati, and he was told that the train would leave that evening at 6.30, so he had much of the day in which to kick his heels.

  However, it would be a good thing to have a look around Jinda and begin to get the feel of Nogolia.

  It was an impressive city, a monument in its way to the white man who had planned it and put those great modem structures where the ramshackle dwellings of a backward, primitive township once had stood. Shaw walked down broad streets lined with palm-trees, streets with big wide built-in concrete canopies stretching across the sidewalks outside the shops to keep away the sun or the rain in their respective seasons. Down the centre of the streets were gardens filled with tropical plants, bright with gay colours, reds and yellows and blues, whites and purples. But over all there was an alien feeling, a kind of heavy brooding, a waiting for something to happen. Shaw had also noticed this at the airport. There were few white people about in that smart, super-modern shopping centre; this may have been due to the rains, but Shaw didn’t think so. Cars could pull right in and discharge their passengers under the canopies. The shops were large, and some of them bore English names, well-known names, many of them, and they were crammed with goods; but they were almost deserted, sad-looking, forlorn and unwanted despite their brave appearance of prosperity. Such white women as Shaw noticed were all escorted, and their menfolk were watchful, alert, and nervy.

  There were crowds of Africans in the streets, Africans of all classes—professional men, white-collar men, working men. Some of these regarded Shaw with open hostility, some with indifference, some with a supercilious air of gloating triumph. All swaggered along with exaggerated cocksureness, even insolent rudeness, with apparently no thought of work in their heads. Here and there a shop window had been smashed in and patched with planking, sign of earlier riots. Even the African constables on traffic and patrol duty seemed vaguely hostile to the whites, were curt with them, inclined to shoulder them aside.

  Shaw came to a huge, glittering hotel, the Independence Hotel, it was called, the big neon sign stretching across its frontage. Looking at his watch, he decided he may as well have lunch here, and he went slowly up the steps, through wide swing doors. He stepped into fashionable elegance, a cool Western elegance. There were thick, soft green carpets, comfortable chairs, air-conditioning. The guests seemed to be predominantly coloured, but there was a fair sprinkling of white men and women, chatting over drinks in over-loud voices which betrayed the strain and the tension that was in them. They would be wondering, Sh
aw guessed, whether they would recognize the moment when they would have to get out and leave their possessions and their lives’ work behind them; wondering if they should have gone already before the storm broke over their heads and took even their lives away from them.

  Shaw went across the foyer and the lounge into a long, chrome-and-green-leather bar.

  The shelves behind the bar were stacked, crammed with bottles. You could get any drink you cared to name in this place, Shaw thought—London, Paris, New York had nothing on this. There were three African ‘boys’ in starched white jackets behind the bar; small groups of men, white and coloured, but segregated apparently by mutual desire, sat in chairs at individual tables. One or two were perched on high stools at the bar itself. Taking a stool, Shaw asked for an iced gin-and-bitters.

  The African barman looked at him, gave a slight inclination of his head, but said nothing. He walked away, took his time over bringing the drink. Shaw took a cigarette from his case and flicked his lighter; it didn’t work. A man in a creased white suit who was sitting at a stool close by, took a box of matches from his pocket He called, “Catch.”

  Shaw caught and said, “Thanks.” He lit his cigarette, took a deep lungful of smoke. He passed the matches back, and the man asked, “You just out from home?”

  “Yes, I am.” Shaw raised an eyebrow and grinned. “Do I look that new?”

  “No, not really.” The man gave a short grunting laugh. “I haven’t seen you before, that’s all. There’s not all that many whites left in the goddam country, and a new face stands out a bit.”

  Shaw nodded. “Getting out fast, are they?”

  “Well. . .” The man pursed his lips, pulling at a small dark moustache. “Dare say I did exaggerate a bit. A lot have gone, and the rest—well, they don’t come out much these days. You’ll find out!”