Operation Nassau (34 page)

I turned. A very efficient fist connected with Wallace Brady’s jaw. and the dark bulk above me suddenly rolled off and vanished. ‘One down and one more to go,’ said Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe, smiling. He put my Frommer into my rather limp hand. ‘It’s all right: I wasn’t in the car when it exploded. All part of the system to draw their attack.’

I heard Johnson call, ‘Bart!’ and Edgecombe smiled reassuringly at me again. One hand was heavily bandaged and he had a very businesslike-looking gun in the other. He said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ve got them surrounded. Get into the bushes and if one of Pentecost’s friends comes across you, shoot to kill. They’re paid assassins, this crowd.’

Then he was gone. I looked at Brady. The brief dusk was already sinking to darkness. My all-American golfer lay on his back, his cream chalk-striped tunic all crumpled and stained. At the foot of the green, Trotter’s cart was still stationary with Mr Tiko lying beside it, his heels together and his arms over his head. Then I saw Trotter had left it again and was travelling, in that extraordinary professional way, head down away from me and towards the third empty cart.

A moment later and he was in it, crouched down on the floor. For a bit, nothing happened. Then it shook and began to move forward slowly, under a rattle of gunfire. In the black jungle beyond it a man suddenly screamed and someone else gave a yell of triumph. The burning car sent a tongue of flame into the air and in its light I saw Krishtof Bey’s pink Bulgar shirt as he leapt to his feet from the bushes, brandishing somebody’s rifle, primitive triumph on the brown, hollow face.

Then, like a shimmer of oil, he was out of the rough and into the fourth and last cart, bouncing over the grass after Trotter. Unlike Trotter, Krishtof Bey didn’t trouble to lie down on the floor of the cart. Rifle on shoulder, he knelt on the white seat and fired back whenever a dark figure moved on the skyline, warbling a quarter-tone war-cry at intervals. From somewhere, I could hear Spry’s voice telling him to mind how he went.

There was a lot of noise suddenly. Behind the brush on the other side of the fairway came the coughing roar of a series of engines starting up, and then the sound of creaking demolition as a line of heavy vehicles began to move forward, crushing the cane and wire-weed and bur-grass, the pockwood and Hercules’ club, the alders, the plantains, the tangle of trefoil and honeysuckle, to move up at the back of the gunmen. Behind me, and ahead on the road beside the wreck of the car, I could hear other engines starting and stopping, and a number of voices among whom I thought I could make out both Edgecombe’s and Johnson’s. The trap round their enemies was being snapped shut at last.

Beside me, Brady groaned and stirred. I rolled into the bushes just as the gunfire at the end of the green suddenly intensified. I thought, they know now it’s a trap. And they know Edgecombe isn’t dead. It’s their last effort to kill him.

Krishtof Bey’s cart had reached the dark bulk of the hut. I saw him jump out, rifle gleaming, and blend into the gloom of its walls. Trotter’s cart had stopped also, and I saw Trotter was running again, but in the opposite direction, to where Edgecombe and Johnson were firing, on my side of the green. I thought, He’s wiser than Krishtof. In a moment those tractors are going to flush out the gunmen and then they are going to come out in the open here, firing.

Trotter had nearly got to the rough when he stopped. I heard Edgecombe’s voice call sharply, ‘Come on, man!’ and guessed he was blocking their fire. Then I saw that Trotter had raised his right hand, and that the gun in it was pointing at Edgecombe.

Trotter aimed, steadied, and fired.

Edgecombe cried, ‘Oh, my God.’

For a moment: for a tenth of a second it seemed as if everything had stopped: the machinery: the shouting; the firing. Then someone moved clumsily in the bushes where Edgecombe had spoken. Moved; rose, took half a step forward and then fell to his knees and then on his face at the edge of the grass. I could distinguish the crumpled bush tunic and, as he dropped, the flash of reflected fire in the twin lenses of his bifocals. Then Edgecombe’s big frame in turn forced its way out from the coppice, and Edgecombe’s voice said, ‘You’ve killed him. You bloody traitor, you’ve killed Johnson instead.’

I think I got to my feet. I know that Edgecombe lunged forward, firing, and that in his face I saw the look of a man bent on retribution and death. Trotter fired one shot wildly, ducking, and then turned tail and ran. I saw Edgecombe break cover and follow, across the green to the hut and the car, regardless of his safety in the blazing, flickering light; firing again and again. I saw Trotter stagger and steady himself, and turning, take aim at Edgecombe again: I saw Edgecombe duck and fire and then curse as the revolver clicked empty.

Behind me, Wallace Brady got to his feet, slowly at first. Then with a lurch he began to move, running, towards Edgecombe’s exposed back. Unaware of his danger. Edgecombe slowed, intent on reloading. In a moment. Brady would reach him.

The Frommer,heavy and hot, was still in my hand. I thumbed off the safety-catch, raised it and took steady aim at my all-American golfing companion.

A hand came down hard on my wrist and another, in the same movement closed my opening mouth. ‘Not this time. Doctor,’ said lohnson. ‘Wallace Brady is mine and the Begum’s.’

I looked at him, the Frommer dropped from my hand. He released me and regarded me, grinning, and then spread his hand under my arm rather quickly. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘I told you about my chilled and rolled underwear. We’re bear-leading the baddies, remember? We do six permutations of this, and then someone really gets killed.’

My head had cleared, and I didn’t need anyone’s help to stand up. I moved away from his hand. ‘It looks to me,’ I said coldly, ‘as if you’re letting them both escape.’

Johnson followed my gaze. Outlined against the glowing car. Trotter appeared for a moment, glanced briefly to left and to right, and then stooping, raced left towards the dunes and the sea. Rifle-fire from the lee of the hut followed him, and then the dark figure of Edgecombe ran past, gun in hand once again. Brady, veering at the last moment, had plunged into the scrub on the left and was running diagonally on a course converging with Trotter’s.

‘They have a car along there,’ Johnson said. ‘Driven into a beach path of Great Harbour Drive. We’ve blocked the Drive, and they’ll have to go through the seaside fairways to reach it.’

He had started running, and I was running beside him. Ahead, the fire was illuminating Krishtof Bey’s beautiful shirt and his rifle: Spry was standing beside him and a number of other men unknown to me were moving out of the undergrowth. Firing still sounded, but a good way ahead.

‘Two of Pentecost’s friends have been accounted for,’ Johnson said. ‘I think what you heard just now will be the remainder.’ He had reached the road and crossed it. I saw Spry look round unsurprised, and Krishtof give a jump. Spry put out a hand and stopped him advancing. No one else made a move to accompany us. I trotted after.

The road to the right was blocked by a dark line of cars, and there were men standing about. The dying light from the wreck flickered on a lime-rubble track sweeping up and into the dark on the right: from ahead came the swish of the sea. There was no sound of footsteps. I realized that Trotter had been directed this way together with those of his friends who survived: that they were being neatly corralled, without further shooting: and that the getaway car would be their ultimate pen. Johnson said, ‘I’m going to the car. There’s no need for you to be in at the kill.’

I said. ‘Yes, there is.’ We were running along the grass edge of the road. On our left, down the fairway, there was no sound at all. It was hard to imagine that there, parallel with us, two men were running for their lives, believing that ahead of them lay a car and escape. I added, under my breath, ‘Where’s Sir Bartholomew?’

Johnson said, ‘Heading them off. He knows where the car is. They’ve got a boat, just past the airport. Look. Here we are.’

Between shrubs on the left, a dim gritty track led towards the rustling boom of the sea. We were almost upon the dark shadow lying within before I realized it was a fast convertible coupe, drawn backwards off the road, its hood down. In the deep shadow to the right of it, men were lying. Johnson spoke to them softly, and then, opening one of its doors, motioned me into the back, closing it quietly on me again. He himself stayed crouched outside.

It was almost dark now, and the afterglow had quite gone from the pale open sky over the sea. The beach lay concealed behind a black frieze of pine trees and coconut palms, their feet in the rough mixed scrub edging the long sixteenth fairway. The raised green lay beside me, its flag invisible against the dark trees, and into the darkness ran the even turf of the fairway, the two pale bunkers to left and to right dim patches before the invisible plateau of the tee.

All this I could see, barely raising my head above the righthand door of the car. On my left, I saw the dark head of Johnson, and behind him a black sea of scrubland stretching between the beach and the road as far as the eye could distinguish. Far in the distance were the prick-lights of the small airport tower. The sea hissed and rumbled and the wind blew lightly south-east, from the airport, and carried all sound away.

The fugitives would arrive from the right, along the long beach-side fairways. They would run through the scrub. I wondered whether they would choose the rough ground by the sea where the waves would drown their footsteps but might also deaden their hearing. Or the low jungle between the fairways and the road, pitted with cuttings and the half-built foundations of villas, good for an ambush or merely a broken ankle for the unwary. Unlike Johnson and myself, they couldn’t take the open, straight road. Theirs, creeping, ducking, silently moving from bush to bush and cover to cover, would take so much longer.

There was no sound now but the sea. The last burst of firing had been some time ago, far over by the blockade. The escaping men had thrown off their pursuers, or had been allowed to believe that they had. Johnson had said that Edgecombe was heading them off. If so, there was no sign of him yet. I wondered if he was lying out there, somewhere under the scented black bushes, with his gun trained on the fairway, waiting for the moment when Trotter and Brady broke cover and made their run for the car.

He had believed Johnson was dead: I had seen it in his face. Nor would I forget the passion of rage in which he had levelled his gun and pulled the trigger on the snarling, swerving figure of Trotter, the smoking gun still in his hand.

And now, suddenly, the hunter was the hunted. Trotter had no time to seek out and kill Edgecombe now. If he wanted to escape with his life, he had to reach this car, and that boat.

Silence. I wondered what Johnson was thinking. And if Judith Cicely Ballantyne was waiting to welcome him home. The men in the lee of the car lay without speaking. The surf buzzed, and a new wave began to echo along its oncoming length and broke and buzzed in its turn, leaving another silence, long and indrawn like a breath.

A long, warbling scream burst upon it, ululating over the fairways, throbbing through the dense, grassy distances far on the right. Johnson’s hand, reaching suddenly from behind, pulled me hard and quickly backwards out of the car. I hit the grass beside someone else and lay as the ciy came again. Then wriggling out of his grasp I gripped the sides of the car and raised my head over the side panel to look.

Bucking out of the dangerous darkness, erect, gallant, befringed and straight out of Schwartz’s side window, came one of the Tamboo Club golf-carts, a flutter of pink silk in the driving-seat, a full-blooded Islamic war-cry emerging from under the canopy. Krishtof Bey was quartering the ground between fairway and road at a high cruising speed, roaring joyous defiance as he did so.

At the same moment, on the other side of the fairway, a second cart jolted out of the darkness and proceeded to scan the rough by the sea side, slowing now and then and picking up speed, but all the time coming steadily nearer.

Dimly, as it approached, I glimpsed within it Bartholomew Edgecombe’s grey mane of hair. Johnson, kneeling beside me. began to laugh and then had to stifle it. ‘My God. The beaters,’ he said under his breath.

He had just spoken when there was a crack from Krishtof Bey’s rifle and a man jumped from the palmetto far on our left, stopped, hesitated, and then turned and ran straight towards us, along the broad open fairway. There was a second shot from Krishtof Bey’s cart; then the cart jerked and began jogging towards us. The runner looked round and then quickened his pace. As he got nearer, the blur of pale hands and face resolved themselves into familiar features.

‘Trotter,’ said Johnson in a murmur. His hand was down, signalling us all to be still. No one moved. His other hand was tight on his gun.

Then I saw Johnson’s fist relax and realized that Edgecombe had seen what was happening. Swerving out from the bush-covered dunes, he had set the cart over the fairway, edging the dark, running figure between Krishtof and himself. And as Trotter sensed it and looked round, a red flash of gunfire from Edgecombe’s cart splintered the darkness.

Trotter didn’t fire back. He ran until we could hear the squeak of his footsteps and the sawing sound of his breath. Johnson let him come. He let him run up to the car on the opposite side of which we were all lying. He let him lay hands on the door-handle as Edgecombe’s golf-cart, cutting in front of its fellow, came to a dead halt.

Trotter had already snatched the door-handle open when the silence warned him the cart had stopped moving. He let it go and flung himself on the ground, gun in hand, as Edgecombe knelt by the steering-wheel and fired at him, again and again.

He missed him. I heard the bullets ring on the side of the car and the rustle as Trotter rolled off and got to his knees. Beside me, Johnson suddenly rose to his feet and stood, madly, in full view behind the low, open car.

Lying where he was, Trotter couldn’t possibly see him. But Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe did. He half rose from where he was crouching, his eyes on Johnson: a vision, a man from the dead, and for a moment in his amazement, forgot even the gun in his hand.