Jack Higgins (23 page)

 

But you can never count on anything in this life. I heard one hell of a yell as I yanked the Uzi sub-machine gun
from its holding clips and glanced up to see Christou standing in the stern by the port rail. He was holding a Mauser automatic pistol in his right hand with its wooden holster clipped on at the rear making a stock. And he was good. He fired twice and one of the bullets caught me somewhere in the right leg, knocking me out of the window.

The Uzi is Israel's personal contribution to the sub-machine gun market and is held in more than average regard by those who know about such things. It has a 25-round detachable magazine which is housed in the right-hand grip and only fires when that grip is squeezed.

I suppose I must have put half the magazine into Christou as I went down because he was lifted off his feet backwards over the rail. I rolled around some more, but not because of the agony in my wounded leg or any of that sort of thing. You feel a punch on the jaw more than you do a bullet when it first hits you because the shock is so great that it numbs the entire nervous system for a while.

In the same moment, I discovered, with some surprise, that I could still use my leg and started to crawl. Kapelari appeared in the prow and loosed off a long burst that ripped up the deck to within a foot or so of me. I squeezed off a few feet of my own in reply, just to keep his head down, and scrambled round the wheelhouse to find myself no more than six feet away from Lazanis.

The fear on his face was terrible to see, breaking through to the surface like scum on a pond. Such was his panic that when he fired, which he did as a reflex action the second I appeared, the first burst from his machine pistol was about a yard to my left.

Still on my hands and knees like an animal, I shoved
the Uzi straight out in front of me one-handed, and gave him the rest of the magazine at point-blank range.

Then I scrambled for the entrance to the wheelhouse where the Walther waited in its clip on that secret flap of mine. I almost made it, had got to the door at ground level and was reaching inside with my left hand, when a bullet drilled me neatly through the palm.

I tried to get up and Kapelari stood there by the starboard rail watching me, a dramatic enough figure to represent death, a sub-machine gun in one hand, a .38 revolver, the one which had done the damage, extended in the other.

“I told Melos you were trouble,” he said bitterly, “but he wouldn't listen. At least we'll have it my way now.”

But he had lost his chance by talking too much. A black wraith came up out of the sea behind him, knife gleaming wickedly in the sunlight. They went back into the water together and only Ciasim came up again.

 

He picked up Lazanis, heaved him over the rail into the water and crouched beside me. I put a hand against his chest. “The briefcase, Ciasim, get that first.”

He tried to argue and I managed to get my good leg up and shoved him away. “My way,” I said. “We'll do it my way. I've earned it, haven't I?”

I suppose I wasn't in my right mind for a time which was hardly surprising, but I think he realised that fact and acted upon it.

“Five minutes, Jack, no longer, I swear. Then I fix you up good. Better than new.”

I lay there, back against the side of the wheelhouse,
while he went down to the stern for another aqualung. I heard the splash when he went in and looked up at the sun. The sky was very blue and bright, so bright that it was all I could do to keep my eyes open.

I closed them for what seemed no more than a second. When I opened them again, he was crouched in front of me holding the briefcase. I noticed the fine quality of the Moroccan leather, the beautiful workmanship of the brass clasp and lock and then remembered that the damned thing was booby-trapped.

In a curiously detached way I wondered whether it might explode as Ciasim passed it to me and I clutched it against my chest, but as I lost consciousness round about then, it didn't really seem to matter.

I surfaced to find myself on my back on the table in the saloon minus my wet suit. Ciasim sat in a chair beside me, a look of intense concentration on his face as he worked on the hole in my right leg. He'd found my medical kit which was navy surplus, twin to the one I'd used with Guyon that night a thousand years ago when Sara and I had discovered him on the floor of my hotel room at Bir el Gafani.

“How are we doing?” I said.

“So there you are.” He grinned. “It is nothing. A fleabite. When the Chinese took me prisoner in fifty-one, they made me walk two hundred miles with worse than this. Two months before they got around to taking the bullet out. See, I show you.”

He helped me to sit up and I raised my right knee and had a look at the damage. There was the usual ragged hole on the outside of the thigh just above the knee where the bullet had entered, a larger one on the inside where it had exited, which explained why I had been
able to scramble around so energetically during the fight on the deck.

“Lucky it didn't go through the other while it was at it,” I said.

“You said we needed luck today and luck you got,” was his only comment.

He took out a couple of field dressings, positioned them on each side of the thigh and bandaged me with surprising dexterity.
Korea again, I suppose
.

My left hand was another matter entirely. I could move the fingers, but only just, and it felt swollen and useless. By the time he'd finished taping it up, it was beginning to hurt like hell and he broke out the ampoules of painkiller the kit contained, and gave me a couple. One in the thigh, the other in the hand.

After that, he went into the galley and made coffee, something the Turks do better than anyone else on earth. When he returned, I told him where the whiskey was hidden. Two cups of coffee, well-laced, and I felt almost human again. By that time, the painkiller had got to work and I found that I could actually walk as far as the door without falling down.

“Too much, too soon, Jack,” he protested. “You lie down for a while now. Try a little sleep.”

“And go out like a light for twenty-four hours? No thanks,” I said. “I haven't the time. Anyway, if you could march two hundred miles over rough country with a bullet in your leg, I can make it to the bloody door.”

But I was glad to sit down, all the same, and accepted the cigarette he offered. “What happens now?” he asked.

“God knows. I'll have to think about it. We ought to be able to come up with something. There's only the
two of them to deal with, Aleko and Melos. He left the rest of his crew in Kyros.”

“It still stinks,” he said. “Melos is a special breed of man, Jack. He'll kill them—my two boys, Lady Sara—as casually as he would snap his fingers, if we give him even a hint of trouble.”

“He'll kill them anyway, old friend,” I told him. “One way or another and us with them. It's the only ending there can be to this business from his point of view.”

“And Aleko?”

“He can't even help himself any more.”

“Then what do we do?”

His face was grave as he waited for my answer.
Jack Savage, miracle worker
. I was getting tired of that role and my head was beginning to ache again. The whiskey had been a poor idea. Alcohol and drugs didn't sit well together or perhaps I was going into shock? It was possible.

“I need some air,” I said and got to my feet.

The truth was that I didn't have an answer for him. Any kind of an answer. I was simply stalling for time and I suppose he knew that as well as I did.

I not only made it to the door. I even managed to negotiate the companionway on my own, mainly because my right leg had lost all feeling by now and my left hand might as well have been chopped off at the wrist.

He was right behind me and put a hand to my elbow as I ventured into the sunlight. It was very quiet up there in the pale afternoon light. Had it happened? Had any of it happened? But the line of bullet holes in the deck on the port side where Kapelari had fired his first burst
at me, the blood, already dry in the heat, where Lazanis had fallen, told me it had not all been part of some mad, impossible nightmare.

The briefcase was on the floor of the wheelhouse, presumably put there by Ciasim when he had carried me below. I picked it up and sat down.

“You know about these things,” he said. “Just how dangerous is that?”

“Ever seen a hand grenade land amongst a group of infantry?”

“This could be as bad?”

“It would finish whoever was tinkering with it and kill or maim anyone else standing close. Perhaps not the same killing radius as a grenade, but good enough.”

“And this would happen the moment you tried to open it?”

“Unless you have the special key that goes with it.” There was a screwdriver in the chart table. I picked it up and inserted the end under the brass clasp. “All I need to do is start levering and up we go.”

And that he didn't like, and I saw with something close to wonder that even he could be touched by fear, if only a little.

He shivered, distaste on his face. “A nasty way to go.”

“And it could be worse,” I told him. “You could survive hopelessly maimed. No hands. Perhaps blinded.”

“I would not wish such a fate on my worst enemy.”

I think it was about then, helped by that final comment, that I suddenly saw exactly what had to be done. The only thing which could be done.

So I told him.

When I had finished his face was grim. “You go to your own death, you know this?”

“Not if I'm lucky, but in any case, it gives Sara and your boys a chance—a real chance, which is better than what they've got now.”

“And you really think Melos will fall for this thing?”

“Nobody wants to die,” I told him. “Not even Melos wants that. He wants to live to be the new chief of the security police when he and his friends take over the country if they ever do. Power, women, money. Whatever it is he really wants, he can only have alive and kicking.”

He crouched there on the deck at my feet beside the wheelhouse door, a cigarette burning between his lips, his eyes dark and far away. Finally he sighed, that strange, inimitable sigh of his that was like a dying fall.

“Right, dear friend, I will not stand in your way. If you must do this thing, you must, but I insist on making my own small contribution.”

He got up and went down to the stern where the diving gear and equipment was still spread out and I limped after him. When I got there, he had the tin of plastic gelignite open and was examining the collection of chemical fuses.

“The short ones,” he said. “Five seconds. Am I right?”

“You'd have to swim like hell to get away from the main concussion area.”

“But a small diversion. Say five pounds of gelignite exploding at the appropriate moment? This would be helpful?”

I couldn't think of anything to say and he smiled gently as if well pleased. “We will survive, dear friend, for
you and I are great survivors. It is our special talent. Now go down to your cabin and sleep for sleep is what you need now. I will wake you when the time comes.”

“Your promise on that,” I said. “No one-man shows.”

“My word on it.”

Which was enough for he was, indeed, a man of finest honour. And I was tired—so damned tired. I made it down to the saloon and got on my bunk and stared up at the ceiling and nothing seemed to make much sense any more. The last thing I recall was hearing the rattle of the chain as he raised the anchor and then I went down deep.

 

It was evening when we raised Kyros, the sun hovering just above the horizon, and the slight, small wind that lifted off the sea touched me coldly as I went out on deck.

The
Gentle Jane
was on automatic pilot and Ciasim was down at the stern making his preparations. He had his wet-suit on again and was checking an aqualung.

He glanced up as I limped into view. “I was going to wake you. Half an hour yet. How do you feel?”

“Fine,” I said, which was a direct lie. “The sleep did me a power of good.”

He didn't believe me, I could tell, but let it pass. “Well, here we are, Jack, the final run, eh?”

He opened his tin of Turkish cigarettes. There was only one left and he broke it in two and offered me half. It tasted terrible, but gave me something to hold on to.

I said, “I'm sorry about your boat. I know what that must have meant.”

“It is in the past, dear friend. All things come to the same end, sooner or later.”

There was a sadness in him then, or was it simply that he was tired, and small wonder. Whatever it was, it touched us both. Resignation, perhaps, or a kind of fatalistic acceptance of what was to come. Certainly it was a mad venture, but then the whole affair had been touched with madness from the beginning.

But sometimes violent ends brought a new beginning. I wasn't too sure about that, wasn't even certain of the rights and wrongs of it all any longer. Could any kind of good come out of so much killing?

There were only two things of which I was certain, two worthwhile items in the whole sorry business. This man's true friendship and a dying girl's love. And there's the Irishman for you, the soft underbelly beneath the hard shell. In the final analysis, I was exactly as Melos had described me—a sentimentalist at heart.

I was aware of a hand on my arm, came back to the present with a start and found him buckling on his aqualung. The plastic gelignite was already pouched in a canvas belt that he had strapped to his waist.

We were close inshore, the cliffs dark in the late evening light and the Old Women of Paxos, standing sentinel at the entrance to the bay, were black against gold. I went into the wheelhouse and took over, reducing the engine speed as we approached the passage until we seemed to barely move through the water.

He stood in the entrance, a formidable figure in his black wet-suit and aqualung. And then he did a strange thing. He reached in and patted my face gently as he might have done to one of his own sons, a gesture of affection I had seen him use with them many times.

“Go with God, my dear friend,” he said.

I watched him move to the rail. He paused for a moment to pull down his mask and adjust his mouthpiece and then he was gone.

 

I don't think I've ever felt so lonely in my life as I did when I turned the
Gentle Jane
into that narrow passage. The Old Women of Paxos towered above me, black as night, and half a dozen gulls cried a warning, swooping down across my deck and up again as if despairing of me.

The water reflecting the evening sun was burnished gold, and I was suspended in it, gliding forward at that same slow rate as if reluctant to venture out into the lagoon.

Strange, but I thought of my father then as I had not thought of him in years and remembered the way of his going. There must have been a moment, one final moment like this for him also. The last second before he had opened the cottage door and stepped out to meet his death.

A waste? So I had told Sara Hamilton, but who was I to judge him? A man had to do what he had to do according to his own judgement of the situation. Nothing less would do. I knew that now, so let it end there.

I coasted into the lagoon and found the
Firebird
anchored fifty yards from the shore exactly as I had left her. There was no sign of life, so I sounded my klaxon. Birds lifted out of the pine trees that fringed the shore, calling harshly, and then Melos appeared, Aleko at his heels.

The edge of the sun was just touching the horizon
now, but there was still plenty of light, certainly enough for them to see that something was very much wrong. Melos was holding a machine pistol and raised it as I cut in close, no more than twenty feet between the two boats.

I shouted and my panic was not all simulated. “For God's sake, no shooting, Melos. I've got the briefcase. Let me come on board and explain.”

I was already past as he lowered the gun. What else could he do?

“I warned you what would happen, Savage,” he called.

I cut the engines and felt the prow of the
Gentle Jane
slide into soft sand as we ran aground. I took the briefcase and went to the stern and lowered the dinghy into the water, which took a little time as my left hand wasn't much use.

So now I was ready—ready for the final throw of the dice. Beyond
Firebird
, I seemed to see a dark shadow against the burnished gold of the water.
Ciasim?
I could only hope so. I got down into the dinghy, awkwardly because of my bad leg, and sculled towards
Firebird
using a single oar over the stern.

There had been signs of activity on deck and as I approached, Melos appeared by the rail, the two Divalni boys and Sara in front of him.