The Dark Crusader (6 page)

The ventilator must have been just outside the radio office and its trumpet-shaped opening made a perfect earphone for collecting and amplifying soundwaves. I could hear the steady chatter of Morse and, over and above that, the sound of two men talking as clearly as if they had been no more than three feet away from me. What they were speaking about I'd no idea, it was in a language I'd never heard before: after a couple of minutes I jumped down, replaced the box and went back to Marie.

"What took you so long?" she asked accusingly. She knew the rats were still around and a phobia doesn't die away in a night.

"Sorry. But you may be grateful yet for the delay. I've found out that we're travelling south but, much more important, I've found out that we can hear what the people on the upper deck are talking about." I told her how I'd discovered this, and she nodded.

"It could be very useful."

"It could be more than useful." I watched her as she swung her legs over the side of the boxes, then touched the side of the right foot, gently. "How does it feel?"

"Stiff. Not very sore."

I pulled off the socks and one side of the plaster bandage. The wound was clean, slightly swollen and slightly blue, but no more than it had any right to be.

"It'll be O.K.," I said. "Hungry?"

"Well." She made a face and rubbed a hand across her stomach. "It's not just that I'm a bad sailor, it's the fearful smell down here."

"Those ventilators appear to be no damned help in the world," I agreed. "But perhaps some tea might be." I moved into the tiny cabin, striking an apprehensive match or two to make sure that there were no rats lurking around and called for attention as I'd done a few hours earlier by hammering on the bulkhead. I moved aft and within a minute the hatch was opened.

I blinked in the blinding glare of light that flooded down into the hold, then moved back as someone came down the ladder. A man with a lantern-jawed face, lean and lined and mournful.

"What's all the racket about?" Henry demanded wearily.

"You promised us some breakfast," I reminded him.

"So we did." He looked at me curiously. "Had a good night?"

"You might have told us about the rats."

"I might have. Hopin' they didn't show themselves. Trouble?"

"My wife was badly bitten on the foot." I dropped my voice so that Marie couldn't hear it. "Rats carry plague, don't they?"

He shook his head. "Rats carry fleas. The fleas carry plague. But not here. Place is awash in D.D.T. Breakfast in ten minutes." With that he was gone, shutting the hatch behind him.

Less than the promised time later the hatch opened again and a stocky brown-haired youngster with dark frizzy golliwog hair came nimbly down the ladder carrying a battered wooden tray in one hand. He grinned at me cheerfully, moved up the aisle and set the tray down on the boxes beside Marie, whipping a dented tin cover off a dish with the air of Escoffier unveiling his latest creation. I looked at the brown sticky mass. I thought I could see rice and shredded coconut.

"What's this?" I asked. "Last week's garbage?"

"Dalo pudding. Very good, sir." He pointed to a chipped enamel pot. "Here is coffee. Also very good." He ducked his head at Marie and left as nimbly as he had come. It went without saying that he shut the hatch behind him.

The pudding was an indigestible and gelatinous mess that tasted and felt like cooked cowhide glue. It was quite inedible but no match for the fearful coffee, lukewarm bilge-water strained through old cement sacks.

"Do you think they're trying to poison us?" Marie asked.

"Impossible. No one could ever eat this stuff in the first place. At least, no European could. By Polynesian standards it probably ranks with caviar. Well, there goes breakfast." I broke off and looked closely at the crate behind the tray. "Well, I'll be damned. Don't miss very much, do I? I've only been sitting with my back against it for about four hours."

"Well, you haven't eyes in the back of your head," she said reasonably. I didn't reply, I'd already unhitched the torch and was peering through the inch cracks between the spars of the crate. "Looks like lemonade bottles or some such to me."

"And to me. Are you developing scruples about managing Captain Fleck's property?" she asked delicately.

I grinned, latched on to my anti-rat club, pried off the top spar, pulled out a bottle and handed it to Marie. "Watch it. Probably neat bootleg gin for sale to the natives."

But it wasn't, it was lemon juice, and excellent stuff at that. Excellent for thirst, but hardly a substitute for breakfast: I took off my jacket and began to investigate the contents of the schooner's hold.

Captain Fleck appeared to be engaged in the perfectly innocuous business of provision carrier. The half-filled spaces between the two sets of battens on either side were taken up by crates of food and drink: meat, fruit and soft drinks. Probably stuff he loaded up on one of the larger islands before setting off to pick up copra. It seemed a reasonable guess. But then, Fleck didn't seem like an innocuous man.

I finished off
a.
breakfast of corned beef and pears-Marie passed it up with a shudder-then began to investigate the contents of the boxes and crates packed ceiling high between the two outer rows of battens and the sides of the schooner. But I didn't get very far. The battens in those rows weren't of the free-sliding type in the inboard rows but were hinged at the top and were designed to lift upwards and inwards: with their lower halfs jammed by the boxes in the inner rows, this was quite impossible. But two of the battens, the two directly behind the lemonade crate, were loose: I examined their tops with the torch and could see that there were no hinges attaching them to the deckhead: from the freshness of the wood where the screws had been, the hinges appeared to have been recently removed. I pushed the battens as far apart as possible, wrestled the top box out of position without breaking my neck, not so easy as it sounds for the boxes were heavy and the rolling of the schooner pretty violent by this time-and placed it on the platform where we'd spent the night.

The box was about two feet long by eighteen inches wide and a foot deep, made of oiled yellow pine. On each of the four corners of the lid was the broad arrow property mark of the Royal Navy. At the top, a stencil semi-obliterated by a thick black line said 'Fleet Air Arm.' Below that were the words 'Alcohol Compasses' and beneath that again 'Redundant. Authorised for disposal', followed by a stencilled crown, very official looking. I pried the top off with some difficulty and the stencils didn't lie: six unmarked alcohol compasses, packed in straw and white paper.

"Looks O.K. to me," I said. "I've seen those stencils before. 'Redundant' is a nice naval term for 'Obsolete'. Gets a better price from civilian buyers. Maybe Captain Fleck is in the legitimate ex-Government surplus stock disposal trade."

"Maybe Captain Fleck had his own private stock of stencils," Marie said skeptically. "How about the next one?"

I got the next one down. This was stencilled 'Binoculars' and binoculars it contained. The third box had again the Fleet Air Arm marking, semi-obliterated, and the stencil 'Inflatable Life-belts (Aircraft)', and again the stencil didn't lie: bright red life-belts with CO2 charges and yellow cylinders marked 'Shark repellent'.

"We're wasting our time," I said. Having to brace one's self against the heavy rolling of the schooner made the lifting and prying open of the boxes heavy work, the heat in the hold was building up as the sun climbed in the sky and the sweat was pouring down my face and back. "Just a common-or-garden second-hand dealer."

"Second-hand dealers don't kidnap people," she said tartly. "Just one more, please. I have a feeling."

I checked the impulse to say that it was easy enough to have a feeling when you didn't have to do the sweating, lugged a fourth and very heavy box off the steadily diminishing pile and lowered it beside the others. The 'same disposal stencils as before, contents marked 'Champion Spark Plugs, 2 gross'."

It took me five minutes and a two-inch strip of skin from the back of my right hand to get the lid off. Marie carefully avoided looking at me, maybe she was a mind-reader, maybe she was just getting good and seasick. But she turned as the lid came clear, peered inside then glanced up at me.

"Maybe Captain Fleck
does
have his own stencils," she murmured.

"Maybe he does at that," I acknowledged. The case was full of drums, but the drums weren't full of spark plugs: there was enough machine-gun belt ammunition inside the case to start off a fair-sized revolution. "This interests me strangely."

"Is-is it safe? If Captain Fleck-"

"What's Captain Fleck ever done for me? Let him come if he wants to." I lugged out a fifth case, sneered at the 'Spark plug' stencil, wrenched off the lid with a combination of leverage and a few well-chosen kicks, stared down at the writing on the heavy blue paper wrapped round the contents, then replaced the lid with all the gentle tenderness and reverent care of a Chicago gangster placing a wreath on the grave of his latest victim.

"Ammonal, 25% aluminium powder?" Marie, too, had glimpsed the writing. "What on earth is that?"

"A very powerful blasting explosive, just about enough to send the schooner and everybody aboard it into orbit." I lifted it gingerly back into position and fresh sweat came to my face when I thought of the elan with which I had hammered it open. "Damn tricky stuff, too. Wrong temperature, wrong handling, excessive humidity-well, it makes quite a bang. I don't like this hold so much any more." I caught up the ammunition crate and returned that also: thistledown never fell so light as that box did on top of the ammonal.

"Are you putting them all back?" There was a tiny frown between her eyes.

"What does it look like to you?"

"Scared?"

"No. Terrified. The next box might have had nitroglycerine or some such. That really would be something." I replaced all the boxes and battens, took the torch and went aft to see what else there was. But there wasn't much. On the port side, six diesel oil drums, all full, kerosene, D.D.T. and some five-gallon water drums shaped and strapped for carrying over the shoulders-Fleck, I supposed, would need these when he topped up water supplies in the more remote islands where there were no other loading facilities. On the starboard side there were a couple of square metal boxes half-full of assorted and rusted ship's ironmongery-nuts, bolts, eyebolts, blocks, tackles, bottle screws, even a couple of marlin spikes.

I eyed the spikes longingly but left them where they were: it didn't seem likely that Captain Fleck would have overlooked the possibility, but, even if he had, a marlin-spike was a good deal slower than a bullet. And very difficult to conceal.

I walked back to Marie Hopeman. She was very pale.

"Nothing there at all. Any ideas about what to do now?"

"You can do what you like," she said calmly. "I'm going to be sick."

"Oh, Lord." I ran for the cabin, hammered on the bulkhead and was standing below the hatch when it opened. It was Captain Fleck himself, clear-eyed, rested, freshly-shaved and clad in white ducks. He courteously removed his cheroot before speaking.

"A splendid morning, Bentall. I trust you-"

"My wife's sick," I interrupted. "She needs fresh air. Can she come up on deck?"

"Sick? Fever?" His tone changed. "I heard a rat had-"

"Sea-sick," I yelled at him.

"On a day like this?" Fleck half-straightened and looked around what he probably regarded as an expanse of flat calm. "One minute."

He snapped his fingers, said something I couldn't catch and waited till the boy who'd brought us breakfast came running up with a pair of binoculars. Fleck made a slow careful 360° sweep of the horizon, then lowered the glasses. "She can come up. You, too, if you like."

I called Marie and let her precede me up the ladder. Fleck gave her a helping hand over the edge of the hatch and said solicitously: "I'm so sorry to hear that you are not too well, Mrs. Bentall. You don't look too good, and that's a fact."

"You are most kind, Captain Fleck." Her tone and look would have shrivelled me, but it bounced right off Fleck. He snapped his fingers again and the boy appeared with a couple of sun-shaded deck-chairs. "You are welcome to remain as long as you wish, both of you. If you are told to go below you must do so immediately. That is understood?"

I nodded silently.

"Good. You will not, of course, be so foolish as to try anything foolish. Our friend Rabat is no Annie Oakley, but he could hardly miss at this range." I turned my head and saw the little Indian, still in black but without his jacket now, sitting on the other side of the hatch with his sawn-off shotgun across his knees. It was pointed straight at my head and he was looking at me in a longing fashion I didn't care for. "I must leave you now," Fleck went on. He smiled, showing his brown crooked teeth. "We shipmasters have our business to attend to. I will see you later."

He left us to fix up the deck-chairs and went for'ard into the wheelhouse beyond the wireless cabin. Marie stretched herself out with a sigh, closed her eyes and in five minutes had the colour back in her cheeks. In ten minutes she had fallen asleep. I should have liked to do the same myself, but Colonel Raine wouldn't have liked it. 'Eternal vigilance, my boy* was his repeated watchword, so I looked round me as vigilantly as I could. But there was nothing much to be vigilant about.

Above, a hot white sun in a washed-out blue-white sky. To the west, a green-blue sea, to the east, the sunward side, deep green sparkling waters pushed into a long low swell by the warm 20-knot trade wind. Off to the south-east, some vague and purplish blurs on the horizon that might have been islands or might equally well have been my imagination. And in the whole expanse of sea not a ship or boat in sight. Not even a flying fish. I transferred my vigilance to the schooner.

Perhaps it wasn't the filthiest vessel in all the seven seas, I'd never seen them all, but it would have taken a good ship to beat it. It was bigger, much bigger, than I had thought, close on a hundred feet in length, and everyone of them greasy, cluttered with refuse, unwashed and unpainted. Or there had been paint, but most of it had sun-blistered off. Two masts, sparred and rigged to carry sails, but no sails in sight, and between the mast-heads a wireless aerial that trailed down to the radio cabin, about twenty feet for'ard from where I sat. I could see the rusted ventilator beyond its open door and beyond that a place that might have been Fleck's charthouse or cabin or both and still further for'ard, but on a higher elevation, the closed-in bridge. Beyond that again, I supposed, below deck level, would be the crew quarters. I spent almost five minutes gazing thoughtfully at the superstructure and fore part of the ship with the odd vague feeling that there was something wrong, that there was something as it shouldn't have been. Maybe Colonel Raine would have got it, but I couldn't. I felt I had done my duty to the Colonel, and keeping my eyes open any longer wouldn't help anyone, asleep or awake they could toss us over the side whenever they wished. I'd had three hours' sleep in the past forty-eight. I closed my eyes. I went to sleep.