Saint Overboard (37 page)

“All ready. Lift!”

The wire cables straightened, became taut and
rigid as steel
bars. A little cloud of disturbed sediment filtered out
like smoke
from the base of the rock. It was going up, rolling over
to follow
the diagonal drag.
…

“Stop!”

The boulder lurched once, and settled; the
hawsers became
slack
again. Looking down breathlessly through the wispy grey
fog that curled sluggishly up around his legs, the Saint saw that
where the stone had once rested was now an
irregular black oval
crater in the
uneven floor. At first he could make out no more
than the hazy outlines of it, but even then he knew that the
shifting of that rock had laid open the last of
Kurt Vogel’s se
crets, the most
amazing Aladdin’s cave that the hoards of piracy
had ever known.

3

Vogel was floundering to the edge of the hole
in the awkward
slow-motion which was the best that either of them could
achieve down there, his arms
waving sprawlingly like the feelers of an octopus in an attempt to help himself
along. He sank down on his knees and lowered his legs into the pit: there
seemed to be
a ladder fixed to the rock
inside, for presently his feet found the
rungs and he began to descend step by step.

Simon started to follow him, but again Vogel
waved him back.
He heard the muffled clatter of the telephone.

“Stay there and guide the cases down to
me.”

The Saint hesitated. Down there in that
narrow cavern at his
feet, beyond any doubt, was Vogel’s
outlandish strong-room; and down there must lie the stupendous booty for which
so much had
been risked and suffered—for which three men had already
set out on a quest from which they never returned, for which Wesley
Yule had
gone down into the silence and died without know
ing why, for which
Loretta and himself had stood under the sentence of death and more than death.
Having fought his way
to it so far, at such a cost, it was almost as
much as he could do
to hold himself back from the last step.

And then he realised that the step could wait.
The murky
smokiness under his feet was settling down, and he could
see
Vogel’s helmet gleaming below him. The boulder which had just
been lifted away was protection
enough for the treasure. There
would be no
more doors to open… .

A vague bulk swaying into the margins of his vision made him
turn with a start. The grab had released the
boulder and gone
up, and now it was descending again with a stack of
bullion cases
clutched in its giant grip.

“Steady!” snapped the Saint into
his telephone, and heaved
himself unwieldily towards it.

The descent stopped; and he got his hands to
the load and
pushed it towards the hole. It was hard work against the
resist
ance of the water, and he needed all his strength. At last it was
in
position, and he ventured to give the order for it to go on.

“Lower slowly.”

The grab descended again, while he strained
against it—the
Falkenberg
was not quite vertically overhead,
and the five or six
feet which the load had to be held out seemed like a
hundred
yards. He kept his weight thrusting against it till it was below
the lip of the hole, and
presently Vogel gave the order to stop.
Simon
recovered his balance with an effort. He could feel a pric
kle of sweat breaking out over his body, and his
vision seemed to
have become
obscured. He realised that a film of steam had con
densed inside the glass panel of his helmet; and
he opened the
air cock on the left of
his helmet and sucked in a mouthful of
water,
blowing it out over the glass as Ivaloff had told him to do
that afternoon. It ran down into the collar of the
dress, and he
could see better.

The claw opened when Vogel gave the word, and
presently
came up
again empty. Simon helped it over the edge of the hole
and let it go by. He tried to estimate how much had gone down
on its first voyage. Half a million? A million?
It was difficult to
calculate, but even the roughest guess staggered the
imagination. It is one thing to talk airily in such astronomical figures; it is
something else again to see them made
concrete and tangible, to
push and
toil against a load of solid wealth which even a million
aire himself might never see. It dawned upon the
Saint that he
had always been too modest in his ambitions. With all his
fame
and success, with all the amazing coups
which he had engineered
and seen
blazoned across the front pages of the world’s press, he
had never touched anything that was not beggared
by this prodi
gious plunder of which
the annals of loot might never see the
like
again.

But he could judge time better than he could
judge the value
of
bar gold. About four minutes, he concluded, was all that went
by between the time when the grab vanished empty
out of the light and the time when it came sinking down again with the
second load. Therefore it would be wise to prepare
the setting
for the last scene at
once.

Again he toiled and struggled to steer the laden grab over the
hole. But this time, as soon as it had gone below
his reach, he groped round for Vogel’s life-line and drew down a fathom of
slack from the hands that held it up on the deck.

Then he took the keen heavy-bladed diver’s
knife out of its
sheath on his belt.

He knew exactly what he was doing; but he was without pity. He
thought of Professor Yule, with the winch inactive and the
oxygen failing, waiting for death in the
grey-green darkness of
the Hurd Deep,
while his voice spoke through the loud speaker
in the blessed light and air without fear. He remembered himself
standing in the wreck of the
Chalfont Castle,
waiting
with a cold and cynical detachment for the monotonous chuffing of the air
driving into his helmet to give place to the last silence in which
death would come. He remembered Loretta, and the
price for
which he had done Vogel’s
work—a price which she had chosen,
he
knew now, a different way to pay. And he was without pity.
In his own way, in all his buccaneering, he had
been just; and it
seemed to him that
this was justice.

He began to cut through the fibres of Vogel’s
life-line.

Load after load of gold came down, and he had
to put his
knife away while he fought it over to the hold and held it
clear
while it went down to Vogel; but in the four-minute intervals
between
those spasms of back-breaking labour he sawed away at
the tough manila with
his heart cold and passionless as iron. He
cut through Vogel’s life-line until only
the telephone wires were
left intact. Then he
cut through his own line till it only hung
together by the same slender link. When he had finished, either
line could be severed completely with one
powerful slash of the
knife-blade.
It had to be done that way; because while the loud
speaker would not
tell which line a voice came over, and the
telephonic
distortion combined with the reverberation inside the
helmet would make it practically impossible to
identify the
voice, the man who held
the other ends of the lines would still
know which was which when the time came to haul them up.

Altogether six loads came down, and the
Saint’s nerves were
strained to the uttermost pitch of endurance while he
waited for
the last two of those loads. Even then, he could still
lose every
thing; he could still die down there and leave Loretta
helpless,
with the only satisfaction of knowing that Kurt Vogel at
least
would never gloat over his defeat or her surrender. If the helms
man
recovered too soon from the volcanic punch under the
jaw
…
He rubbed
his cold right fist in the palm of his left,
hand, wondering. His
knuckles were still sore and his wrist still
ached from the
concussion; he was sure that never in his life
had he struck such a
blow. And yet, if Fate still had the cards
stacked against him … He wondered what
sort of a bargain he could strike, with Vogel at his mercy down there… .

“That’s all.”

It must have been Arnheim’s voice. The Saint
heard it through
a sort of muffling fog for which the acoustics of the
helmet
could not have been entirely responsible. He saw that the empty
grab was
coming up out of the pit for the last time. It bumped
over the rocky floor,
swung clear, and rose up under the steadily
blazing lamp. The
gold was all down, and only the account remained for settlement.

The thudding beat of the Saint’s pulses which
had crept up
imperceptibly
to a pounding crescendo during those last minutes
of nerve-splitting suspense suddenly died down. Only then did he
become aware, from the void left by its cessation,
that it had
ever reached such a height. But his blood ran as cool and
smooth as a river of liquid ice as he folded Vogel’s telephone wires over
his knife-blade and snapped them through with one
powerful
jerk of his arm.

Quietly and steadily as if he had been dressing
himself in cos
tume for a dance, he brought the end of Vogel’s lifeline
round
his own
waist and knotted it in a careful bowline. He spoke into
the telephone in a sufficient imitation of the
flat rhythm of Vo
gel’s accent.

“Wait a moment.”

He drew down some more of his own life-line and hitched it
round a jagged spur of granite above the cut he had
made in it,
so that it would still be
anchored there after he broke the tele
phone
wires.

The top of Vogel’s helmet was coming to the
surface as he
climbed up the ladder.

Simon went down on one knee at the edge of
the hole. His
right hand dabbed round and found a large loose stone,
twice the
size of his fist. He picked it up.

“No,” he said, still speaking with
Vogel’s intonation. “You
stay here. I have something else for you to
do. I shall come
down again in a few minutes.”

Vogel’s hand came over the top of the hole
and clutched for a
hold. His head rose above the surface, and he waved the
Saint
impatiently back to make room for him to clamber out.

Simon did not move.

The broken end of Vogel’s life-line trailed
away from its lash
ing on his helmet, but he did not seem to have noticed
it. His
head turned up towards the light, and his lips moved in some
words
which no one would ever hear.

The Saint stayed where he was.

Perhaps it was the fact that he received no answer to whatever
he had said that started the first wild and ghastly
doubt in Vo
gel’s mind. Perhaps it
was the absolute immobility of the gro
tesque
shape crouching over him. Whatever it may have been, he
stopped. And then he brought his helmet slowly
nearer to the
Saint’s, until barely
six inches separated their front windows.

The Saint let him look. It had never been
part of his plan that
Vogel should be spared that final revelation.
For the first time he
held up his head and turned it so that the
other could get a
straight view into his helmet. The light above them
reflected into
his face from Vogel’s upturned casque and filtered
through the
side panels to outline his features. The effect must
still have been
dim and shadowy, but at that close range it would still
be recog
nisable.

And Vogel recognised it. His black burning
eyes widened into
fathomless pools of horror, and the thin bloodless lips
drew back
from his teeth in a kind of snarl. For the first time the
smooth
waxen mask was smashed away from his face, and only the snarl
of the wolf
remained. Then he began to speak. His mouth
twisted in the shape
of soundless words that no human ears
would ever hear. Until he found that
there was no answer and no
obedience; and one of his hands groped round
and found the
loose
trailing end of his severed line …