Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (18 page)

Desperately Bela’s man scrabbled to regain his gun. It was still warm from his previous grip. But his panting pleasure exploded into a scream of pain as he felt two battering-ram knees punch into the small of his back. He felt a dry, stubbly material across his face, and then stretch and tighten round his neck. There was no air now, not even the poisonous air there had been before; white lights came behind his eyes and his tongue turned to a balloon. Then the blinding lights in his head went out.

Rogo stayed on his back for a whole minute afterwards, holding his suspenders stretched as tightly as he could. Then he slid off and spun the dead man over. He saw a small weasel face with what might have been a moustache or just a careless shave. He was only a kid. Festooned around his neck were Rogo’s suspenders, and the light showed the decorative horses that pranced down them.

Linda had bought them for his Christmas present. When was that? A week ago. She got them with horses because she said they had class. Horses! Class! Horseback riding ain’t my style, Rogo remembered saying, but it was no use. Linda was dead now, and Rogo had killed a man with the suspenders. Well, one thing you gotta give good-class suspenders: they don’t bust when you strangle guys with them. He unwound his gift and stood up.

The trap had worked. Just a pair of suspenders and a movie seat. It was the oldest trick in the world. Get the guy to look the other way and then hit him. He’d fallen for it all the way. Christ, he thought, but that had been close when the kid just about sat on him. Rogo had been worried for a second then. And those goddamn panel lights! He felt the warmth creeping into his shoes. He took the light from the man’s unprotesting fingers and shone it down. His evening dress pants, filthy, greasy and shapeless, were now shredded below the knees. He looked like a castaway. Blood rose through the long, straight lacerations that fringed his legs. The hell with it, he thought. Mike Rogo ain’t no ballerina anyway.

THE TUNNEL OF DEATH

10

It was the sight of that familiar freckled face that snapped the screaming woman out of her hysterics.

“You remember me,” Martin pressed, holding her face in his hands. “Mr. Martin. You know, the Mr. Martin who kept on pestering for vitamin pills?”

“Oh, Mr. Martin!” She groaned with relief. “Oh, Mr. Martin, you and those pills. And I told you they didn’t do a scrap of good.”

He grinned up at Coby and Klaas as they gathered round the sobbing woman in the library. “I haven’t had any since dinner last night and I’m doing okay. You must’ve been right.”

As soon as the shock of the screams had worn off, they had seen where they were coming from. They had picked their way through the mounds of books to the furthermost corner of the library where the slumped body shuddered and groaned.

At first Martin did not recognize her. She was soaking and filthy. The impeccable white uniform he remembered was now a torn, stained rag. The jauntily authoritative hat gone. The hair, formerly severe, straggled around her face, greased with water and oil. It was hard to imagine that this defeated, whimpering creature had been the affable despot he had known as the ship’s nurse. He had last seen her with the doctor leading a group of passengers along Broadway towards the bow of the ship. They had insisted that it was the only way to escape. What had happened to them all?

Talk of Martin and his pills jerked her back to reality. She sat up and looked at the little group. At the sight of Coby, another woman, however young, she made a futile attempt to shape the drenched wreckage of her hair. Then she explained. She had been sent by the doctor to bring up the rear of their column of refugees, and they had headed towards the rescue they were confident awaited them. The water hit them quite unexpectedly when the doctor opened a watertight door, and the force of the inrushing flood had swamped them.

She had managed to run a little way before the waters caught her and swept her back along Broadway. The currents that must have swirled through the ship had taken her into the library, and she lay clinging on the top of the shelves in a bubble of air that remained when the water level settled. With the ship’s last shift of angle, the sea had been sucked from the room, and she simply dropped to the ceiling. She had lain there since, terrified, disorientated, sobbing, and screaming.

She was fast recovering the self-possession of her training, and Martin was beginning to explain the new circumstances, when they heard the heavy clumping of feet and bumping and cursing in the corridor. The oaths were not in English. One of Bela’s men must have penetrated the traps.

They listened anxiously.

“There’s nothing we can do by ourselves, is there?” Coby said.

Martin’s irritation was fueled even further when Klaas said to him, “How can we fight them if they have guns?”

“Well,” Martin was pleased to hear that his thin voice sounded quite firm. “We’re on our own now. We must try to fight. Don’t be afraid, Coby, they’ve only got two arms and legs like us, you know.”

He checked their faces for the confidence he was seeking to inspire. There was none. He understood. It was hard for them to feel confidence in a little guy with red hair and baby-blue eyes.

He tiptoed back nearer the door and signaled the others to follow him. The nurse got to her feet. Klaas shook his head in doubt. Coby looked at the unlikely hero with the Adam’s apple bobbing in his stalk of a neck, but she followed him, and squeezed his arm in encouragement.

Even Martin’s eagerness for action wavered when he saw the shape in the doorway. It was the one they had called Anton, the giant who was going to torture Mr. Rogo. Martin felt his breathing quicken.

Anton stepped in and shone his light around. This was the room, he was sure of it. And there they were. The old seaman. The pretty girl. A woman he had never seen before. The skinny little man. He gave a chuckle, a genuinely gratified chuckle. He reached for the gun in his belt and rocked towards them.

Martin knew that was the moment. “Right, let him have it, folks!” he shouted. For one paralyzed second, he realized he had no idea what to do next. Then he snatched up a book and flung it with a twist of his wiry frame. It hit Anton just below the eye.

Anton swayed clumsily. He shifted his foot to regain balance and it slipped on a pile of soaking books. His great arms waved wildly, the flashlight beam flying around the room like a demented lighthouse.

Another volume caught him on the temple. “Great stuff, Coby!” said Martin. She had been the first to follow his example. Then Klaas too joined in, and the nurse.

Suddenly the air was thick with books. Some half open and spinning and fluttering, others cemented with water and flying as straight as rocks, and the darkened room seemed filled with them, clattering and whirling. Anton reeled around, confused by the din and blinded by the hurricane all around him. His head flinched back and his arms tried to fend off the blows as he lurched around.

Martin was whooping jubilantly. “More, more, Coby. We’ve got him going now!”

The nurse was recovered. She hurled a book that smacked Anton loudly on the ear. “There, you big brute!” she shouted, and pushed back a strand of dyed blonde hair.

It was a bear-baiting. Anton was the huge, powerful beast unable to come to grips with the little terriers that tormented him, and the angrier he got the less he could think clearly. His gun was gone. As he tried to hold out the light before him to see his torturers, a heavy book from Klaas’s hand caught him full in the face. His balance went completely. He crashed over backwards like a demolished building. They had felled him.

Martin was beside himself with excitement. He was grinning and laughing, the wild glee of the action surging through him. They had done it. They had conquered the giant. Who needed Jason? Mr. Rogo would have to treat him with more respect after this!

Without a second thought, he snatched up a heavy volume and moved in for the kill.

There is always one terrier that goes too near the bear. Anton was not even wounded. He was dazed. He was confused. He was frustrated. He had fallen over and had now pushed himself up into a sitting position with one hand, the other still trying to ward off the raining books. But he was not injured apart from small bruises and cuts. And when he saw the keen-faced little man come hurtling at him with a book raised above his head, he swept round an arm and caught Martin’s raised foot. Martin’s hot-eyed excitement faded to doubt and then to terror as he landed helplessly on his back, his foot caught in a remorseless, inhuman grip.

He wriggled and squirmed and kicked but there was no release. He screamed. He could feel the bones being crushed together as though there were no flesh and sinews between them, until they seemed to be rasping on each other under the relentless pressure. He spun to his stomach, clawing at the ground to try to escape, but he heard Anton’s mindless laughter and felt another huge hand clasp round his calf and drag him down. His own small white hands ran frightened through the piles of books like mice, and found no grip.

The books still bounced off Anton and blood ran from his nose into the wide gape of his grin. The laughter overflowed from him. All doubts and confusion had gone. He had hold of one of them now. He would break those little bones, then all the others, one by one. He ignored the whistling missiles around his head. They did not matter now. He ignored too the slim figure that scuttled around his side and behind him, and concentrated on pulling the twisting body into his eager arms.

Coby hurried past Anton, who was slowly drawing in his haul. She scrabbled around the mounds until she found what she knew she must have. Turning, she looked down on Anton’s back, and from high above her head smashed down a beautifully bound, embossed, and massively heavy tome of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
It would have floored a bison.

The mad barrage stopped. Martin looked back over his shoulder. Coby looked down on the book resting between her hands.

The cry was that of a puzzled, pained child. Anton’s head retreated into his turtle-neck exactly like a turtle’s. He lifted his hands to contain the booming bells inside his skull, and covered his face and ears, oblivious to the rest of the world.

“Let’s go,” Klaas hustled the nurse towards the door. Martin, his face white as paper, crawled fearfully around Anton on all fours and Coby helped him to stand.

“Run for it, James. We must run for it now.” She was panting and pulling at his arm as Anton began to rise, still clasping his head. “Quick, or he’ll get us again.”

But Martin stopped in the doorway. Klaas was urging the nurse up the corridor. “Just a minute,” he said. Anton was swaying towards him. The pain flickered on Martin’s face as he put down his injured foot. With both hands he took hold of the back of the one set of bookshelves that was still intact. It was propped against the wall, still holding most of its contents and kept in place by a few screws. He tugged at it fiercely and felt the screws grinding in their sockets. The weight of the laden shelves began to swing out a little, then rocked back to rest against the wall. His spine felt like ice.

“He’s coming, James! He’ll get you again. Run, please! Please run!” He could hear Coby’s anguished pleas from the doorway, and he could see Anton, tearing at the air in front of him for speed as he slipped and stumbled through heaps of books.

All the old fears welled up again inside the little shopkeeper, and again he conquered them. He did not run. He tugged once more at the side of the shelving until he felt the sharp edge bite deep into his fingers. His shoulders heaved. The whole structure of the bookshelves creaked arthritically in its joints as the last screws relinquished their hold, and the twelve-foot-high book-packed frame arced at last through the air. It shattered over Anton. Martin made for the door. His appetite for adventure was sated.

For fifteen or even twenty minutes, Rogo had waited inside the door of the theater, listening. His right hand held the gun, his left the unlit flash and his forgotten suspenders. The tiger had killed one of the thugs, he thought. He had killed another. But he was sure he had heard one go thundering down the passage earlier. Rogo was not sure how many of the
Komarevo
crew were alive, or where they were. It was not a time for risks.

He slipped gingerly out into Broadway. It was empty and silent, as far as his eyes could penetrate the half-light. He decided to check the boiler room first to see if any more of the killers were coming through, and then to see what had happened to his own party. He began to edge his way along, inch by tentative inch.

“Hands high, imperialist swine!” The hissing voice and sibilant accent were reinforced by the hard gun nuzzle in his spine. He raised his arms. At the same time he felt his trousers slipping down, and found himself in the blinding glare of a light, his gun, flash, and suspenders above his head and his legs bowed in a pair of vast, baggy underpants that touched his knees.

Jason’s ringing laugh was unrestrained. “Well, you sure do believe in wrapping up against the cold, you sexy old Batman,” he said. Rogo turned slowly to see the young American and the French girl, their faces wide with smiles. Jason added, “Now I would have said you were a black lace man myself. But you never can tell.”