Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (22 page)

Grimly, the policeman answered, “Over a dozen. With Stechkins, and all we have is this pistol and three shots gone already.”

He was surprised that Jason did not seem too dismayed by his gloomy outline of their position. All he said was a whispered, “Follow me, everyone,” and, ducking down, he shuffled towards the hold, giving a hushed commentary to Rogo behind him.

“Remember my parcels, Rogo? Well, I guess it’s a little late for Christmas presents, but I got a little something specially for you. Thought of getting you a thumbscrew or a picture of Adolf Hitler . . .” He was in the back of the hold now, pulling at the smashed packing cases. “But I thought of what old Manny used to say, and got you . . . a surprise.”

He turned round and threw something into Rogo’s hands. It was a rifle. An old rifle. A World War Two rifle. But it was a rifle.

With a muted whoop of joy, Rogo dived in beside Jason. The case was packed with beautifully oiled and maintained Garand rifles, their polished wooden stocks gleaming, and from another damaged case Jason was prizing ammunition.

They were all crowding round as Rogo passed out the weapons. From outside they heard the gunfire again. It beat out a sinister tattoo all around the engine room. Bela’s men were raking the whole place with bullets to try to locate them.

The nurse refused Jason’s offer of a weapon. “But I will help with the ammunition,” she said. Everyone else was armed, and Jason was shepherding them out of the hold and back behind the safety of the turbine. He talked in urgent whispers all the time.

“You handled one of these, Martin?”

The shopkeeper replied, “Well, they’d been holding up all the stores around town so I went and took some lessons at the armory. Not with rifles, but the sergeant says I’m quite good if I keep my head . . .”

“Great!” Jason dropped on one knee and leaned to look around the end of the metal barrier. He fired off an experimental shot, then another.

“You okay?” Rogo asked Klaas. Then he saw that the captain was going through the manual of inspection of the professional soldier. He examined all the mechanisms, wiped off some oil, pulled back the firing bolt, and squinted down the barrel. Then he raised himself over the top of the turbine and fired steadily into the darkness.

“Wow!” said Rogo. “Sorry, skipper.”

The Dutchman spoke over his shoulder. “All Europeans of my age have handled guns, Mr. Rogo. We had a little problem when I was a young man. Perhaps you heard of it over there in America?”

“Whaddya mean—all Europeans?” Rogo was kneeling beside Jason, and he too was firing. Then he continued the mood of genial whispered jousting. “Who got you outta that mess? I carried one these goddamn things from Omaha Beach to the Rhine.”

“Oh, really? I didn’t know you’d been an honest man in your youth, Rogo,” Jason chipped in. His smile faded when he saw Hely. She was beside Klaas, and she was shooting with the accomplished steadiness of a professional. She saw his look. “Rabbit shooting,” she explained, and his grin returned.

Even Martin was joining in, “Hey, Mr. Jason,” he said, in a muffled voice. “The address on those packing cases was Mexicana Street, Anaheim. There’s no Mexicana Street there I can recall.”

“That’s right,” Jason’s reply was low but clear. “And these aren’t tins of tomatoes as it said in the manifest.” He bobbed around the turbine once more and took a fast shot. “Those Greeks didn’t ask too many questions if the money was okay.”

“How the hell did you get here anyway?” Rogo asked Jason, between carefully taken shots. Jason explained in staccato sentences. He had climbed the central shaft to the bottom, now the top, of the ship, and made his way through the passages used by the engineers. He knew it was bound to lead into the engine room.

As they crouched down to push in new clips, backs against the steel wall that protected them, Rogo asked, “And what happened to your playmate?”

With mock grief, Jason whispered, “He went out to lunch with the tiger. They died in each other’s arms.”

The silence from Bela’s men was shattered by sustained bursts of automatic fire. It was terrifyingly loud in the metal chamber, and Coby flinched as a wild fusillade combed their end of the room. But no bullets found their way into the sanctuary between the machine and the back of the bulkhead.

Still the only light came through the six-foot square punched out of the side of the boat. Outside, the morning sun was stronger now, and the broad beam which penetrated the engine room half-lit a scene in which the participants could find no point of reference within their experience.

As he had instructed, Bela’s men had fled to the far end of the room and taken up positions protected by the jumbled walls of dynamos, rotors, and generators. There they felt themselves to be completely safe, and began to pour burst after burst of gunfire across the room at the huge turbine which sheltered Jason’s oddly assorted fighting team.

But they too were shielded by the wrecked machinery, and the
Komarevo
crew waited impatiently for a careless limb to show, or a too curious face to be raised. Their gunfire rattled futilely against the turbine and the bulkhead above them.

In turn, Jason and Rogo and company soon found that they were unable to expose themselves for long enough to return fire. They were locked in a stalemate of safety.

Jason assessed their situation. For all the hideous unfamiliarity of the setting, he realized that what they were fighting was simply a traditional guerilla battle. The battered machinery and the complex patterns of the torn piping, however eerie, were no different from the cliffs and hills and jungles of Vietnam, and victory would go to those who used the terrain intelligently. There must, he thought, be some way to break the stranglehold and turn the pressure on Bela.

Then he had it. He briefed the others in a whisper, and saw small, grim smiles on strained faces.

They knelt in a short straight line beneath the shelter of the turbine, all except the nurse, and lifted their rifles to an angle of forty-five degrees. The precision of their coordination contrasted oddly with their tattered appearance. They looked like some freakish platoon about to fire a military salute.

“Now!” Jason’s command set all six guns cracking. Coby fell over backwards from the recoil, but rapidly resumed her position and started firing again. The Garand was too heavy for her to handle easily. Martin had to struggle to keep the angle accurate. They blasted shot after shot into the impenetrable blackness of the top of the hull.

A scream, followed by furious shouting and maddened oaths, came from the far side of the room, and Jason knew his plan had worked. They had concentrated their fire into the curved shell of the hull where he judged it would rain ricochets on their smug enemies, and so it had. Certainly two or three of them had been hit by that random fusillade, and it would uproot them at least temporarily.

Jason and Rogo rose shoulder to shoulder and lifted cautious heads. The
Komarevo
men were too busy scrambling to new positions to be alert now. Rogo caught a glimpse of a white face and quickly made a direct shot. The roar of rage told him he had scored. Jason too began to fire straight across the room into the darkness, and renewed sounds of panic showed he had added to their confusion. The stalemate was broken. Now Bela and his men were the ones under pressure, and they could not reverse the tactic because the bulkhead wall behind Jason offered no helpful angles.

Rogo and Jason talked quietly as they watched, and fired off shots at every moving shadow. It was the talk of comrades, of soldiers of action together, of men sharing the same threat and the same courage.

“Like your present, Rogo?” Jason’s grin was reflected in his voice.

“Hell, I like it okay, but Bela ain’t so impressed. So this was your little parcel, cowboy? I never took you for a gunrunner.” He said it without criticism, but Jason whipped back on the words. “I’m no gunrunner. Well, not what you think of one anyway. That’s Bela’s trade.”

“Okay, okay. Cool it.” For once, it was the cop who was soothing the other man. “Where were they going, then?”

“First they were going to some guys I know in Lebanon. That was when the Christians there were having a bad time. Now, I dunno. The Christians suddenly started behaving like lions, and I’m not sure I want to help them anymore. So maybe I’ll reroute them to Africa. There are some nice guys down there who are anxious to move along a couple of upstart dictators. Perhaps I can give them a hand.”

There was a note of open admiration in Rogo’s reply. “Cowboy, you might look like a dopehead but you sure as hell know how to handle a gun. Vietnam?”

“Yep.” Jason methodically sent three shots slapping off the side of the hull and grinned at the muffled crashing which followed. “Yep, I kinda got my head screwed up in Nam. Y’know?”

To his surprise, Rogo nodded. “A lotta nice kids did.”

They both ducked as sporadic bursts began to come back at them. Bela’s crew was obviously regrouping and recovering from the shock reversal.

Rogo rose quickly, fired, then stooped and dropped the empty clip and picked up a new one. The nurse was scurrying from one to another with ammunition. The firing from the other side was building up again, and Martin and the others were shooting mostly in vain now.

“So what’s with all this gunrun . . . dealing then?”

“It sounds crazy, I know, but I thought maybe I could help some of the guys the world didn’t want to know about. I suppose I appointed myself as world sheriff.”

Rogo laughed. “That’s one helluva job to take on. Me, I ain’t got time to put the world right. Only my corner.”

Their faces were barely a foot apart, oil-stained and streaked with sweat, and they exchanged a look of mutual understanding. “Batman, you are so right. From here on out, I just tend my own garden.”

“Fine,” Rogo answered. “And right now we got this half-assed Commie in our garden. Let’s knock the living daylights outta him again.”

They were rising when the burst of automatic fire halted, and Bela’s clear, pleasant voice came through the darkness. “Talk, Captain Jason.”

“You got nothing to say that will interest me, Bela,” came Jason’s unhesitating reply.

“Perhaps you will correct that opinion when you hear, comrade.”

Bela had been thinking. He had been furious at losing the initial advantage in the battle. Two of his men were dead, three more were injured. They had now found new positions among the debris where that hail of ricochet could not reach them. But they were faced with a long fight to try to get rid of Jason and his men and get at the gold, especially now that Jason’s group had acquired rifles and ammunition. By the sound alone, it was obvious the guns were not of modern design, but it would still make Bela’s job that much more difficult, and that much more protracted. Time was running out.

Then a thought that had been troubling him from the start surfaced from his subconscious. The girl. The skin diver. What was she doing fighting side by side with a policeman of apparently bullheaded integrity, and a romantic idealist like Jason. That was their weakness. He would exploit it.

“I will tell you, Captain Jason. If you should get out of this—and that is very unlikely—how will you account for the fact that your representatives of law and, I believe you call it, order are in the company of a ghoul?”

THE DIVE

13

A mystified silence followed his words. Rogo and Jason made uncomprehending faces at each other. “What’s he trying to pull now?” grunted Rogo. Martin, Klaas, Coby, and the nurse all searched each other’s eyes for some explanation and found none. Hely was sitting on her haunches. She laid the rifle down beside her. Her face was downcast. The dream was falling apart.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Jason shouted back. He sounded neither interested nor excited.

Bela was relishing every minute of it now. “The underwater lady, Jason. She is the ghoul. She and her friends were robbers of the dead. Thieves, crooks, liars. They had been stripping jewelry off the bodies below. My men killed the rest but she got away. Ask her.”

Jason’s grin at this preposterous claim hesitated before Rogo’s stunned face, and vanished when he turned to Hely. She was as pale as death. She could not lift her eyes to look at him. He could see the glistening lines of tears on her face. He slumped against the cold metal.

Deliberately, very slowly, Rogo rose and walked over to her. His voice was soft and gentle. “We better take a look in that purse now, sister.” She did not move or try to hinder him.

His hand scooped down in the bag. For a second he closed his eyes. Then he brought his hand out and opened it for all to see. Even in that dim light the jewels were a handful of dancing lights. And there in the middle of that vision of glittering wealth was the finger, one end a polished nail, the other a ragged, bleeding stump.

Jason raised his head and saw. His whole body tightened. His lips pressed to a thin line, the muscles of his jaw tensed, and the breath came harshly down his nose.

Then he spoke, at first quietly. “I thought you were real. I believed in you.” His voice began to rise. “And you were a fake, a phony. A lying, thieving sham. Scum! You are scum!” His fury echoed around her sunken head. “Get out! Go! Get away from me!”