The Adventures of Tintin (7 page)

SAKHARINE STOMPED FURIOUSLY
up the stairs, pausing on a catwalk between the stairwell and his cabin door to make sure Tom and Allan knew what would be required. The huge tanker ship, named the
Karaboudjan
, rolled on the stormy seas, but no storm could match Sakharine’s temper when cocky adventurers meddled with his plans. He wished they were on a pirate ship so he could make someone walk the plank. Curse it, though—he needed the lad to talk first. He could walk the plank later, or suffer some other doom of Sakharine’s invention. There could be no question of Tintin leaving the
Karaboudjan
alive, and Sakharine was also determined to make the lad reveal the secret of the scroll’s location.

Whatever it took.

“He’s lying,” Sakharine said to Tom and Allan. “He must have the scroll. The question is, what has he done with it?”

“We searched him all over, boss,” Tom said.

“I want you to go back down there and make him talk,” Sakharine said, emphasizing the last three words by poking his cane into Tom’s chest. “Do what it takes. Break every bone in his body if you have to.”

Tom looked upset. “That’s nasty,” he said.

Sakharine rolled his eyes. It was hard to find good goons these days. “You know the stakes,” he said. “You know what we’re playing for. Just do it!”

He was about to dismiss them when another crew member, Pedro, came running up, calling Sakharine’s name. He looked panicked. “Mr. Sakharine!” he said. “All
infierno
has broken loose! It’s a disaster! The captain has come around—”

“What?” Allan interjected. Sakharine was equally surprised. He never expected the
Karaboudjan
’s real captain would awaken before the end of the voyage.

“He’s conscious!” Pedro insisted. “He’s accusing you of mutiny! He says you turned the crew against him.”

“Sounds like he’s sobered up again,” Allan said, which was also what Sakharine was thinking.

“Well, don’t just stand there, you fool,” Sakharine said. “Get him another bottle.”

“
Sí, señor
,” Pedro said. Allan and Tom both chimed in, “Yes, sir!”

Shaking his head over the quality of his henchmen, Sakharine stomped into his cabin and slammed the door. He did not wish to be disturbed until someone brought him news that Tintin had told them where the parchment was hidden.

It took only a few minutes for Snowy to chew through the ropes binding Tintin, and after that it was easy to flip the latch on the cage where Sakharine’s goons had put him. But getting out of the hold? That looked to be a trickier proposition. Tintin looked around the hold, peering into the shadowy crevices between stacks of crates for any kind of tool, or something he could put to use.

“A crowbar, Snowy,” he said, finding one left behind a stack of crates stenciled with Chinese characters. “That’s something, perhaps.”

He took the crowbar and worked it into the wheel that controlled the deadbolt on the door, jamming it tight. If he couldn’t get out, at least he could make sure that Sakharine couldn’t get in. Then he pulled the top off a nearby crate and propped it up so it covered the steel door’s small window. As he did this, he heard a growl from somewhere in the hold. “Snowy?” he said.

But it wasn’t Snowy. Snowy, in fact, was sniffing at a particular crate, and the growl was coming from inside it.
Hmmm
, thought Tintin. What sort of strange cargo was this ship carrying? He filed the question away in case it came in handy later. Right now, however, he needed that crate simply to stand on.

He pushed it over to the nearest porthole and climbed on top of the crate so he could pry the porthole open. Snowy jumped up next to him and tried to peer out the porthole, but Tintin wouldn’t let him. “Not yet, Snowy. Let me see what’s out there first.”

With a grunt, Tintin opened the porthole. A gust of cool, salty air blew in, and he inhaled deeply. He loved the sea. He didn’t like being kidnapped and caged, though. And he especially didn’t like being threatened.

Leaning out the porthole, he saw that the ship was huge, an almost endless wall of steel hull receding fore and aft. He could see the name of the ship painted on the hull:
Karaboudjan
. Tintin wasn’t even surprised as the connection was revealed. Barnaby
had
tried to warn him. At least one mystery was solved.

The ocean stretched endlessly toward the horizon, rough and tumbling and gray. He was a fair distance above the water, but when he looked up, he saw that he was a fair distance below the main deck, too.

At first it seemed that there was nowhere Tintin could even think about escaping to. Then he took another look and began to consider the row of portholes directly above his. Perhaps . . .

A clank and a groaning sound from the door made Tintin jump. He looked back and saw that the crowbar was holding where he had wedged it into the wheel. The wheel turned a little back and forth, and Tintin heard voices from the other side, out in the hall. “Jiggle it a little bit,” Tom was saying. “It’s just stuck.”

There was a smack and a yelp from Tom. “It’s not stuck, you idiot!” Allan said. “He’s bolted it from the inside.”

Tintin knew he would have to act fast now that they knew he had removed the ropes that were binding him. He started looking around the room to see what else might be of use. “So you want to play it like that, do you?” Allan called from outside. “Tintin!”

Tintin didn’t answer.

Then he heard Allan say, “Get the dynamite.”

Uh-oh
, Tintin thought. Now he was
really
going to have to move fast. “Broken crates, rope, champagne,” he said, looking around. “What else do we have, Snowy?”

Snowy growled at whatever was in the crate Tintin had pushed over to the porthole. An answering growl came from within and Snowy backed away.

“There are other ways to open this door, Tintin!” Allan roared from the hall. “They’ll be swabbing the decks with your innards when we’re done with you!”

Points for originality
, thought Tintin. But he doubted his innards would be very useful in getting the decks clean. He pushed a crate of champagne away from a corner and positioned it directly in front of the door, perhaps ten feet away. He tipped the crate on its side so all the bottles were aimed at the door, then carefully—very carefully—worked the top off the crate. Part one of the plan was in place, but it wouldn’t do any good if he couldn’t make part two work.

He started breaking up an empty crate. Allan was yelling at someone to hurry up, and a hubbub of voices out in the hall told Tintin that more of Sakharine’s goons were gathering.

Something thunked against the door. Tintin guessed it was those explosives Allan had mentioned. “This had better work, Snowy,” Tintin said, and went back to the porthole, dragging with him a number of planks tied together and tethered to a long rope fashioned from shorter pieces of rope tied together. He fed the planks out the porthole and then the rope until the whole string of them was twisting and waving in the wind.

He leaned back into the hold to check on Snowy and see that the rest of his arrangements were in place. Everything looked about right. Then he started smelling the scent of a burning fuse.

“Here we go,” Tintin said. He started to swing the length of knotted-together rope back and forth, building momentum, until he let the planks at the end fly straight up toward an open porthole above him. The bundle of planks went up, up . . . and missed!

And then, before Tintin could duck out of the way, the planks came straight back down and conked him right on the head, exactly where Nestor had hit him with the candlestick.

Tintin saw stars, but he was able to hold on to the rope. This was no time to be knocked out! If Allan and Tom got into the hold, Tintin wasn’t ever going to wake up again.

He took a couple of deep breaths. Behind him, on the floor, Snowy whined. Everything was quiet out in the hall. Tintin figured that the henchmen were all hiding away from the impending explosion. He hefted the planks, waited as they banged off the hull of the ship below him near the churning waterline, and then tossed the bundle up again.

The rope extended and looped away from the ship in the wind, and Tintin snapped his wrist to arc the planks toward the porthole above him. He almost overbalanced and fell out the porthole. Behind him, Snowy grabbed his pants leg and held on.

The snap of Tintin’s wrist sent the planks right through the porthole above, and then he yanked on the rope to twist them against the window. It worked! The planks turned and functioned as an anchor to the porthole above, and Tintin now had a rope he could climb up to safety.

And that was when the bomb went off.

OUT IN THE
hallway, Allan and the rest of the goons stood up, guns in hand. “Move!” Allan yelled. Everyone’s ears were ringing, but they could tell what he was saying by the way he waved. “Let’s go!”

The men started to charge into the hold to look for Tintin, but everything was hidden by the smoke from the explosion. It had blown the door right off its hinges and left debris all over the immediate area, and right as they stepped through the doorway, they heard gunshots!

All of them ducked behind the fallen door or around the edges of the doorway. “He’s got a big shooter!” Tom said. He jumped out, brandishing his gun, and was hit and knocked down. Rolling around, he moaned, “Got me . . .”

Then they all noticed the champagne cork that fell onto the floor next to him. Allan picked it up. “Hold your fire,” he said, and peered around the edge of the door frame.

Rows of champagne bottles were aimed at the doorway. Many of them had popped their corks from the vibrations of the explosion. Foamy champagne spilled from the open bottles into a widening puddle on the floor. Allan didn’t see Tintin anywhere.

Tom stuck his head out next to Allan. “He ain’t here!” he said. “He’s vanished!”

The sound of his voice shook loose a couple more corks. One of them ricocheted off the fallen door, and another nailed Tom square in the forehead, knocking him out cold.

Allan looked down at him for a moment, unable to quite believe what was happening. How could they all have been outsmarted by a kid they’d left tied up in a locked hold? “He’s hiding,” Allan said. He ducked another popping cork, which shot past him into the hall. “Search the ship!”

Tintin heard some of this as he dangled from the rope, trying to brace his feet against the ship’s hull so he could climb. He couldn’t help laughing at the champagne corks. Snowy, hanging by his teeth from the cuff of Tintin’s pants, didn’t see what was so funny. Tintin got his feet braced and pulled them up so he was leaning away from the hull. He held on with one hand and reached down with the other to help Snowy.

Once Snowy had his teeth on Tintin’s jacket and his back feet hooked into Tintin’s belt, Tintin started climbing. It took only a minute for him to get to the next porthole above. He reached one arm in and got himself arranged so the bottom lip of the porthole was wedged between his elbow and his side. Then he boosted Snowy into the stateroom, which was warmly lit. There was a smell of whiskey and wool inside.