Jack Higgins

1.In a Lonely Place

2.The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

3.In Harm's Way

4.One Kind of Answer

5.Dead Men's Fingers

6.The Smile on the Face of the Tiger

7.Passage of Arms—May 1946

8.A Knife in the Heart

9.Fugue in Time

10.Headlong into Eternity

11.The Rum-runner

12.Force of Circumstance

13.Good Loving and a Long Life

14.Plan of Attack

15.Assault by Night

16.Bad End for a Good Ship

17.The Run to Turk's Head

18.Point-Blank

I found him in about ten fathoms of smoky green water a couple of hundred yards beyond the Point. It was the parachute that first caught my eye. Somehow he'd managed to release it, a reflex action, I suppose, even as he drowned. It hovered above the weeds like some strange white flower, pale in the green light.

He lay six feet below in a patch of open sand, still strapped into his ejection seat from what I could see. I swam on and saw the plane almost at once, crouched on its belly in the weeds like some weird sea beast. I don't know why, but it made me feel vaguely uneasy. It was almost as if the damned thing was alive.

It took all the guts I had, which wasn't much at that time, to move in close. I looked inside the cockpit at the multiplicity of controls and instruments, dials phosphorescent in the dim light. The control column stirred gently in the water, moved by an invisible hand. It was enough. I went up fast, found the anchor chain and followed it in a cloud of champagne bubbles. Suddenly the
water was green glass saturated with sunlight, the
Gentle Jane
's hull clear above me.

There was no need to decompress. I hadn't been down long enough, but I was cold which was my own fault for not wearing a wetsuit and when I surfaced beside the ladder, an east wind stirred the water briskly, sending a wave of greyness through me so that I shivered as I scrambled over the side.

Morgan gave me a hand, his face anxious, that worried look there again. I could smell the whiskey fresh on his breath.

“All right, Jack?” he said.

I managed a tired grin and unbuckled my aqualung. “I'm getting old, Morg, that's all. I'll have that drink now.”

He passed me a half-bottle of Jameson from the pocket of his old reefer and I took a long pull. It didn't exactly burn its way down, I'd been on the stuff too long for that, but it certainly hit some kind of spot, and deep inside, a warm glow started to spread outwards.

“You can taste the peat,” I said and gave him the bottle back.

He handled it nervously for a moment. I nodded and he had a quick swallow, hesitated, took another, then screwed on the cap with some reluctance and put the bottle back in his pocket.

The Egyptian M.T.B. was tied up to our starboard rail and Hakim was standing with his back to us talking to the captain, a young naval lieutenant, and an army officer. Hakim turned and seeing me, stepped over the rail, a tall, handsome, olive-skinned man, elegant in an off-white linen suit and old Harrovian tie.

More English than the bloody English
. The Irish in
me came to the surface rather easily at times or perhaps it was only the whiskey talking.

“Ah, Mr. Savage,” he said. “Any luck?”

I nodded. “Just as you thought. Israeli. Mirage III.”

“What kind of condition is she in?”

“Not a scratch on her. I don't think your anti-aircraft had a thing to do with it.”

“That is absurd. I have a report from the officer commanding the battery concerned. The plane was definitely brought down by ack-ack fire.”

The army officer had joined us. He was about thirty, a major in military intelligence with a face badly scarred by shrapnel and dark, mad eyes. The kind who'd had a bad time in Sinai, for whom there could only ever be one solution. The total obliteration of the State of Israel.

“Major Ibrahim has only recently been seconded from Cairo to assist me.” Hakim took out an elegant gold case and offered me a cigarette. “When they fly in off the sea like this on these hit-and-run missions, Major, they come in low. Usually six hundred feet or less to get below our radar.”

Which didn't leave much of a margain for error. The Mirage has a maximum level speed of 1,450 miles an hour and climbs ten thousand feet in a minute. Nudge the stick or even cough at six hundred feet and you were in trouble. The lad on his back down there beneath the parachute must have been playing at submarines before he knew what was happening.

The major opened his mouth to argue the point, then closed it again. The cigarette was Turkish, but not the kind you can buy in Burlington Arcade and the smoke bit at the back of my throat harshly.

I started to cough and Hakim said with some concern,
“You are tired, my friend, this has been too much for one man.”

“No one else available,” I said. “I've got the main crew working off-shore at Abu-Kir on the Liberian cargo ship that went down in the shallows.”

“And Guyon, the diver who usually works with you? What about him?”

It was Major Ibrahim who had spoken and there was something in his voice, something I didn't like. The same uneasy feeling I had felt down there with the Mirage stirred in me again.

“He's gone into Alex to see the doctor,” I said. “He pulled a shoulder muscle yesterday.”

Ibrahim was going to take it further, but Hakim put a hand on his shoulder and said smoothly, “To come back to the Mirage. You can salvage her?”

“A couple of days' work at the most. I'll have to bring the two work boats in from Alexandria and as many pontoons as I can lay hands on. Another thing, I've only got one floating crane. I'll need another.”

“It will be provided.” He looked pleased with himself, which wasn't surprising. It isn't every day you pick up a highly sophisticated, supersonic jet complete with air-to-air missiles, for free, which was what it came down to.

“I think you will find my country not ungrateful for your co-operation, Mr. Savage,” Hakim went on.

“A co-operation we should be able to count on without question.” Ibrahim again. “You are privileged, Savage. We have allowed you to stay in Egypt, to develop a most valuable business undertaking. Few Europeans can say the same.”

He delivered his little speech with some bitterness, but it was water off a duck's back to me.

“I'm more than grateful, Major,” I said. “On the other hand I think I should point out that I'm a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, the most neutral nation on earth. We showed you all the way a long time ago. And politics bore me. We invented them.”

“Those who are not for us are against us,” he intoned, straight off page 53 of the manual.

“Not me, friend, I never take sides. You live longer that way.”

I stood up and nodded to Morgan who was looking more anxious than ever. “I'll have the other aqualung. This one is almost empty. A single cylinder should do it.”

“Hell, Jack, you've chanced your arm enough down there for one day on your own. You're on borrowed time now.”

He was right, of course. Rule number one in any manual was never dive alone, but in this case I didn't really have a great deal of choice and he knew it because even as he argued, he was buckling on the aqualung.

“Is it necessary to go down again, Mr. Savage?” Hakim asked me.

“The pilot,” I said.

“Ah, of course.” He nodded in understanding.

“Let him rot,” the major cut in, real anger in his voice.

He put a hand on my shoulder and he was shaking. God knows what had happened to him in the war, what mental anguish he had suffered since, but there was real pain in the dark eyes. More than that—hate.

“You go to hell,” I said.

I turned to the rail. There had been at least twenty fishing boats scattered around us when I had first gone down. I saw now that they had been joined by a red and white speedboat that floated no more than a dozen yards away. So close, in fact, that the occupants must have heard most of what we had been saying.

There were two of them. At an inch over six feet and with the poundage to go with it, I'd always thought of myself as being reasonably sizeable, but the man who sat at the wheel was a giant. He was stripped to the waist and built like a gladiator, a scarf knotted careless about his neck. He wore a yachting cap and dark glasses which made it difficult to make out much of his face, but for some reason he looked familiar.

But it was the girl who seized me by the throat from that very first moment and would not let go, standing there in the stern, hands on hips, staring straight at me in a black bikini that barely managed to cover what it was supposed to, and long hair hanging straight to the shoulders, so pale that it was almost white, glinting in the sunlight.

She could have stepped right off the cover of the summer edition of any top-flight fashion magazine if it hadn't been for the face. Now that was something special. Calm grey eyes that looked straight through you, high cheekbones, a wide mouth that lifted slightly at one side in perpetual scorn at the world and over all, the inbred arrogance of your natural aristocrat.

For some reason, I nodded. She called, “Can you manage?”

That beautifully clipped, upper-crust English voice just had to bring out the Irish in me. I thickened the brogue and replied cheerfully, “And why shouldn't I?
A fine day to die in, thanks be to God, as my old grandma used to say.”

That's all it took. She knew me then till the crack of doom right through to the backbone. The lip curled, but in laughter this time. I pulled on my face mask and went over the side. I paused to adjust my air supply and went straight down following the anchor chain for most of the way.

I'd made a mistake. I was tired—too tired for this kind of game and I could feel the cold seeping through my flesh. But there was more to it than that. As a diver descends, the deepening layers of water filter the sunlight, absorbing all red and orange rays. At fifty feet, I entered a neutral zone. Visibility was good, but colours were muted and autumnal.

The parachute blossomed unexpectedly from the green smoke. I went into it, the pale fronds enveloping me so that for a moment, I had to struggle to break free. The fear moved in my belly again. The same fear that had risen like bile in my throat on that nightmare occasion the previous year when I had wallowed helplessly in the black mud at the bottom of the outer harbour at Alexandria, waiting to die as the ice-cold water rose to chin level inside my helmet.

And then I was free and moving down towards the pilot, knife ready. I sliced through the cords of the chute which drifted away, giving me a look at him. His eyes were open in stunned surprise, one arm floating upright as if reaching out for help. The chain around his neck carried a tiny gold Star of David.

Poor lad, he looked so young. I couldn't leave him down there in the cold. I think it was then that the fear left me, but I was tired—so damned tired.

I wrestled with the straps on the ejection seat for a minute or so and then he drifted free, legs straightening, one arm sliding about my neck. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to put an arm round his waist and we went up together.

God, but it was slow. My brain seemed to have stopped functioning and I was caught in an endless spiral that had no ending. I broke through to the surface with something of a surprise and found myself closer to the speedboat than to the
Gentle Jane
.

I caught a quick glimpse of the girl staring down at me and went under again. I surfaced minus the pilot and found her companion in the water beside me holding him. I struck out for the speedboat which seemed the obvious thing to do, and the girl reached over and held my hand in a way that said she hadn't the slightest intention of letting go again, even if it meant going down with me.

“Easy, big man,” she said. “You've had it.”

She hooked a ladder over the side with her free hand and I summoned up everything I had and went up it. Behind me her friend seemed to be towing the body of the pilot across to the
Gentle Jane
.

I pulled off my face mask, aware of her hands busy with my aqualung straps. I was dizzy, lightning streaking my vision, the sun too bright and the scent of her filled my nostrils, my mind. It was like some strange, strange dream.

“What perfume are you wearing?” I gasped.

She chuckled and eased me out of the aqualung. “Intimacy.”

“Now that's more than flesh and blood can stand,” I said and opened my eyes.

The sun was behind her, the pale gold hair like white fire in a cloud about her and the eyes, those strange grey eyes turned me inside out.

“I wonder what it looks like spread across a pillow?” I said.

“Irish.” She leaned over me. “I might have known. What's your name?”

“Savage—Jack Savage.”

“Right, Jack Savage. Let's get you home.”

She started the engine, took the boat round expertly, throttled back and laid her alongside the
Gentle Jane
. The gladiator came over the side, water dripping from the kind of body that wouldn't have disgraced a heavyweight wrestler.

He held out his hand. “Aleko—Dimitri Aleko. You are a brave man, Mr. Savage. To go down once on your own is bad enough, but twice…Now that, I respect.”

And he meant it, every damned word of it. I heaved my aqualung up to Morgan. “I owe you a drink, both of you. I'll be in the bar at Saunder's tonight if you feel like collecting.”

“You've got a date, my friend.”