The Dark Crusader (24 page)

"That's right." It was Farley speaking, his voice impatient. "Australian. Trader, mainly in Government surplus, but he's also on charter to us. Rigorously investigated, security clearance, of course."

"Of course, of course." My mind was occupied with visions of Heck busily transferring mail from one end of the island to the other and then back again. "Does he know what's going on here?"

"Of course not," Anderson said. "All work on the rockets- there are two of them-are carried on under cover. Anyway, does it matter, Mr. Bentall?"

"It doesn't matter." Not any more, it didn't. "I think, Anderson, that we'd better go and consult with your Captain Griffiths. We have little time left. I'm afraid we may have no time left."

I turned to the door and halted as knuckles rapped on the outside of it. Anderson said "Come in" and the door opened. Leading Seaman Allison stood there, blinking in the sudden glare of light."

"The Surgeon-Lieutenant is here, sir."

"Ah, good, good! Come in, Brookman, we-" He broke off and said sharply: "Where's your gun, Allison?"

Allison grunted in agony as something struck him from behind with tremendous force and sent him staggering into the room to crash heavily into Farley. Both men were still reeling, falling together against one of the cubicle walls, when the massive form of Hewell appeared in the doorway. He loomed tall as Everest, the gaunt granitic face empty of all life, the black eyes far back and hidden under the tufted brows-he must have forced Allison to go first to give his own eyes time to become accustomed to the light-and in his huge fist was a gun, a gun fitted with a black cylindrical object screwed on to the barrel. A silencer.

Sub-Lieutenant Anderson made the last mistake of his life. He had a Navy Colt strapped to his waist and the mistake he made was trying to reach for it. I shouted out a warning, tried to reach him to knock his arm down, but he was on my left side and my crippled arm was far too slow.

I had a momentary glimpse of Hewell's face and I knew it was too late. His face was as still and as motionless and as empty of life as ever as he squeezed the trigger. A soft muffled thud, a look of faint surprise in Anderson's eyes as he put both hands to his chest and started toppling slowly backwards. I tried to catch him and break his fall, which was a foolish thing to do, it didn't help either of us, all it did was to wrench my left shoulder violently and there's not much point in hurting yourself trying to cushion the fall of a man who will never feel anything again.

CHAPTER NINE

Friday 6 A.M.-8 A.M.

Hewell advanced into the room. He didn't even look at the dead man on the floor. He made a gesture with his left hand and two soft-footed Chinese, each with a machine-pistol in his hand, came in through the doorway behind him: they carried their guns as if they knew how to use them.

"Anybody here armed?" Hewell asked in his deep gravelly voice. "Anybody here with arms in this room? If so, tell me now. If I find arms on any man or in any man's room and he hasn't told me, I'll kill him. Any arms here?"

There were no arms there. If any of them had toothpicks and thought Hewell might have considered those as arms, they'd have rushed to get them. Hewell had that effect on people. Also, there was no doubt but that he meant what he said.

"Good." He advanced another step and looked down at me. "You fooled us, Bentall, didn't you? That makes you very clever. Nothing wrong with your foot, was there, Ben-tall? But your arm isn't so good, is it-I suppose the Doberman did that to you before you killed it? And you killed two of my best men, didn't you, Bentall? I'm afraid you will have to pay for that."

There was nothing sinister or menacing about the slow sepulchral voice, but then it didn't have to be, the man's looming presence, the craggy ruin of a face made any further menace completely superfluous. I didn't doubt that I would pay.

"But it will have to wait. Just a little. We can't have you dying on us yet, can we, Bentall?" He spoke a few quick words in a foreign language to the Chinese on his right, a tall sinewy intelligent looking man with a face as still as Hewell's own, then turned back to me. "I have to leave you for a moment-we have the guards by the boundary fence to attend to. The main compound and garrison are already in our hands and all telephone lines to the guardposts cut. I am leaving Hang, here, to look after you. Don't any of you try anything clever with Hang. You might think one man, even with a Tommy-gun, can't hold nine men in a small room, and if any of you think that and try to act on it that's as good a way as any to find out why Hang was the sergeant-major of a machine-gun battalion in Korea." Hewell's thin lips cracked in a humourless smile. "No prizes for guessing what side he was on."

Seconds later, he and the other Chinese were gone. I looked at Marie and she at me: but her face was tired and somehow sad and the small smile she gave me hadn't much behind it. Everybody else was looking at the Chinese guard. He didn't appear to be looking at anybody.

Farley cleared his throat and said conversationally: "I think we could rush him, Bentall. One from each side."

"You rush him," I said. "I'm staying where I am."

"Damn it all, man." His voice was low and desperate. "It may be our last chance."

"We've had our last chance. Your courage is admirable, Farley, which is more than can be said for your intelligence. Don't be a damned idiot."

"But-"

"You heard what Bentall said?" The guard spoke in faultless English, with a heavy American accent. '"Don't be a damned idiot."

Farley subsided in a moment, you could see the swift collapse of the stiffened sinews of his resolution, the draining of the insular arrogance which had led to the bland assumption that the guard could speak no language other than his own.

"You will all sit and cross your legs," the guard went on. "That will be safer--for yourselves. I don't want to kill anyone." He paused, then added as an after-thought: "Except Bentall. You killed two members of my long, tonight, Bentall."

There didn't seem to be any suitable comment on that one, so I let it pass.

"You may smoke if you wish," he continued. "You may talk, but do not talk in whispers."

There was no hurry to take him up on his second offer. There are some situations which make it difficult to choose an agreeable topic of conversation and this seemed to be one of them. Besides, I didn't want to talk, I wanted to think, if I could do it without damaging myself. I tried to figure out how Hewell and company had got through so soon. It had been more or less a certainty, I'd known, that they were going to break through that morning, but it had come hours before I had expected it. Had they made a spot check to see if we were still in bed? Possible, but unlikely: they'd showed no signs of suspicion when we'd seen them after the fire. Or had they found the dead Chinese in the tomb? That was more likely, but even if true it was still damnably hard luck.

I suppose I ought to have been bent double under the weight of bitterness and chagrin but strangely enough it hardly crossed my mind. The game was lost and that was all that was to it: or the game up till now was lost, which seemed to be about the same thing. Or maybe it wasn't. It was as if Marie had read my mind.

"You're still figuring, aren't you, Johnny?" She gave me that smile again, the smile that I'd never seen her give anyone, not even Witherspoon, and ray heart started capering around like a court jester in the middle ages until I reminded it that this was a girl who could fool anyone. "It's like the Colonel said. Sitting in the electric chair, the man's hand on the switch and you're still figuring."

"Sure, I'm figuring," I said sourly. "I'm figuring how long I've got to live."

I saw the quick hurt in her eyes and turned away. Hargreaves was regarding me thoughtfully. He was still scared, but he could still think. And Hargreaves had a good mind.

"You're hardly a goner yet, are you?" he asked. "From what I gather neither your friend Hewell nor this man here would hesitate to kill you. But they don't. Hewell said, 'We can't have you dying on us yet.' And you used to work in the same department as Dr. Fairfield. Could you be the fuel expert that we've been expecting?"

"I suppose I am." There was no point in saying anything else, I hadn't known the bogus Witherspoon half an hour altogether before I'd told him that. I wondered if, anywhere along the line there was a mistake I could have made and hadn't. Looking back, it seemed unlikely. "It's a long story. Some other time."

"Could you do it?"

"Do what?"

"Fuse up the rocket?"

"I wouldn't even know how to go about it," I said untruthfully.

"But you worked with Fairfield," Hargreaves persisted.

"Not on solid fuel."

"But-"

"I don't know a single thing about his latest solid fuel development," I said harshly. And to think I'd thought he had a good mind. Would the damned fool never shut up? Didn't he know the guard was listening? What did he want to do-put a rope round my neck. I could see Marie staring at him, her lips compressed, her hazel eyes very far from friendly. "They've been too damned secret about all this," I finished. "They've sent out the wrong expert."

"Well, that's useful," Hargreaves muttered.

"Isn't it? I never even knew of the existence of this Black Shrike of yours. How about putting me in the picture about it? I'm one of those characters who believe that a man should go on learning till the day he dies: this looks like my last chance to collect some fresh information."

He hesitated, then said slowly: "I'm afraid-"

"You're afraid it's all very top secret," I said impatiently. "Sure it's very secret-but not to anyone on this island. Not any longer."

"I suppose not," Hargreaves said doubtfully. He thought for a moment and then smiled. "You will remember the late and bitterly lamented Blue Streak rocket?"

"Our one and only entrant in the inter-continental ballistic missiles stakes?" I nodded. "Sure I remember it. It could do everything a missile should do, except fly. Everyone felt this was very awkward. Considerable heart-burning when the Government dropped it. Much talk about selling out to the Americans, being absolutely dependent for nuclear defence on the Americans, Britain now a very second-rate power, if you could call her a power at all. I remember. The Government was vastly unpopular."

"Yes. And they didn't deserve any of it. They dropped the entire project because one or two of the better military and scientific minds in Britain-we have one or two-kindly pointed out to them that the Blue Streak was a hundred percent unsuitable for its purpose anyway. It was based on American type models, such as the Atlas I.C.B.M., which takes twenty minutes to count down and get under way from the moment of the first alarm, which is all very well for the Americans: with their DEW-lines and advanced radar stations, their infra-red detectors and spies-in-the-skies to detect exhaust trails of launched I.C.B.M.'s, they're counting on getting a half an hour when some maniac presses the wrong button. All the warning we can expect is four minutes." Hargreaves took off his spectacles, polished them carefully and blinked myopically. "Which means that if the Blue Streak had worked, and if the count-down had started the moment the warning had come through it would still have been wiped out of existence by a five megaton Russian ICBM sixteen minutes before it was due to take
off."

"I can count," I said. "You don't have to spell it out for me."

"We had to spell it out for the Ministry of Defence," Hargreaves replied. "Took them three or four years to catch on, which is about par for the military mind. Look at the admirals and their battleships. The other great drawback of the Blue Streak, of course, is that it would have required a huge launching installation, all the ramps, gantries, and blockhouses, the enormous trailers of helium and liquid nitrogen to pump in the kerosene and liquid oxygen under pressure, and, finally, the vast size of the rocket itself. This meant a permanent and fixed installation, and with all those hordes of British and American planes flying over Russian territories, Russian planes flying over American and British territories-and for all I know, British and Americans flying over one another's territories-those locations have become so well known that practically every launching base in the U.S. and Russia has a corresponding ICBM from the other country zeroed in on it.

"What was wanted, then, was a rocket that could be fired instantaneously-and a rocket that was completely mobile, completely portable. This was impossible with any known missile fuel. Certainly not with the kerosene-kerosene, in this day and age!-which along with liquid oxygen still powers most of the American rockets. Certainly, either, not with the liquid hydrogen engines the Americans are working on today, the boiling point of -423 °F. makes them ten times as tricky to handle as anything yet known. And they're far too big."

"They were working on cesium and ion fuels," I said.

"They'll be working on them for a long time to come. They've got a dozen separate firms working on those and you know the old saw about too many cooks. And so the mobile rocket ready for instant firing was impossible with any known propellant-until Hargreaves came up with a brilliantly simple idea for solid fuel, twenty times as powerful as used in the American Minuteman. It's so brilliantly simple," Hargreaves admitted, "that I don't know how it works."

Neither did I. But I'd learnt enough from Fairfield to learn how to make it work. But here and now I never would.

"You're sure it really does work?" I asked.

"We're sure, all right. On a small scale, that is. Dr. Fairfield fitted a twenty-eight pound charge to a specially constructed miniature rocket and fired it from an uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. It took off exactly as Fairfield had predicted, very slowly at first, far more slowly than conventional missiles." Hargreaves smiled reminiscently. "And then it started accelerating. We-the radar scanners- lost it about 60,000 feet. It was still accelerating and doing close on 16,000 miles an hour. Then more experiments, scaled down charges, till he got what he wanted. Then we multiplied the weight of the rocket, fuel, simulated warhead and brain by 400. And that's the Black Shrike."