The Dark Crusader (15 page)

A few seconds later I was wishing the same thing myself. I'd just passed over a tiny culvert where a small stream, almost covered in with bushes and thickets, ran down from the mountain to the sea, and had taken no more than ten paces beyond when there came the quick stealthy rush of padding feet behind me, something heavy crashed into my back and shoulder and then, before I'd time to start reacting, something else closed over my upper left arm, just above the elbow, with all the power and brutal savagery of a sprung bear-trap. The immediate pain was agonizing.

Hewell. That was my first and instinctive reaction as I staggered and lurched and all but fell. Hewell, it must be Hewell, no one else I'd ever known could have a grip like that, it felt as if my arm was being crushed in half. I swung round in a vicious half-circle hooking with all the strength of my right arm for where his stomach ought to have been and all I did was make a hole in the night. I almost dislocated my right shoulder but I'd more to think about than that as I lurched sideways again, fighting for my balance. Fighting for my balance and fighting for my life. It wasn't Hewell who had me, but a dog about the size and power of a wolf.

I tried to tear him off with my right hand but all I did was to sink those huge teeth still deeper into my arm. I tried crashing my right fist again and again against that powerful body but he was so far to my left and back that I could barely reach him. I tried kicking, but I couldn't get anywhere near him. I couldn't get at him, I couldn't shake him off, there was no solid object I could crush him against and I knew that if I tried falling on top of him he'd have loosened his grip and had my throat before I knew what he was about.

He must have weighed between eighty and ninety pounds.

He had fangs like steel hooks and when you have steel hooks embedded in your arm and a weight of ninety pounds suspended from them only one thing can happen-the skin and flesh start to tear, and I haven't any different skin or flesh from anyone else. I could feel myself getting weak, I could feel the waves of pain and nausea washing over me when, in a moment of clarity, my mind or what passes for it started working again. I'd no trouble in getting the knife clear of my belt, but it took almost ten interminable and pain-filled seconds before I could free it one-handed from its cloth wrapping. After that it was easy, the stiletto point entered just below the breastbone and angled inwards and upwards for the heart, meeting almost no resistance. The bear-trap grip on my arm loosened in a fraction of a second and the dog was dead before it reached the ground.

I didn't know what kind of dog it was and I didn't care. I hauled him by his heavy studded collar till I came to the culvert I'd so recently crossed, dragged him down the short bank to the stream and pulled him into the water where the bushes were thickest. I thought he would be pretty well screened from sight above but I didn't dare use my torch to see. I jammed him in place with some heavy stones so that no freshet after, heavy rain could wash him into view, then lay face down by the stream for almost five minutes till the sharpest of the pain, the shock and nausea had worn off and my racing pulse and pounding heart returned to something like normal. It had been a bad couple of minutes.

Getting my shirt and singlet off was no pleasure at all, the arm was already stiffening up, but I managed it and washed my arm thoroughly in the running water. I was glad it was fresh water and not salt. Washing my arm, I thought, was going to do me a great deal of good if that dog had been suffering from hydrophobia, about the same effect as if I washed my arm after a king cobra had struck. But there didn't seem to be much point in worrying about it, so I bandaged up my arm as well as I could with strips torn from my singlet, pulled on my shirt, climbed out of the culvert and continued on my way, still following the metal tracks. I carried the knife in my right hand now and I hadn't any cloth wrapped round it either. I felt chilled, cold with the ice-cold of a vicious anger. I wasn't kindly disposed towards anyone.

I was almost round to the south of the island now. There were no trees, just bushes and scattered low shrub that was no good for concealment at all unless you lay prone on the ground, and I wasn't in the mood for lying prone on the ground. But I hadn't altogether taken leave of my senses and when the moon suddenly broke through into a large patch quite free from cloud I dropped flat and peered out from the shelter of some bushes that wouldn't have given decent cover to a rabbit.

In the brilliant wash of the moonlight I could see now that my first impression of the island from the reef that morning hadn't been entirely accurate, the early morning mists had obscured the true features to the south of the island. True, the narrow plain at the foot of the mountain did, from where I lay, seem to go all the way round the island, but it was much narrower here than in the east. Moreover, it didn't slope steadily towards the sea but seemed even to slope from the sea to the base of the mountain: which meant only one thing, that the island to the south must end in a very steep drop to the lagoon, perhaps even a sheer cliff-face. And I hadn't been right about the mountain either, although this new feature I couldn't have seen from the reef: instead of having the continuously smooth steeply sloping surface of a cone, the mountain seemed to be almost completely bisected down its southerly face by a gigantic cleft or ravine, no doubt a relic of that catastrophic day when the northern half of the mountain had vanished into the sea. What this entire physical configuration amounted to was that the only way from east to west on this island appeared to lie across the narrow connecting belt of plain to the south: it couldn't have been more than a hundred and twenty yards wide.

Fifteen minutes later that patch in the clouds was twice as large and the moon still in the middle of it, so I decided to move. In that bright moonlight a move backwards would have been just as conspicuous as a move forwards, so I decided I might as well keep going on. I cursed that moon pretty steadily. I said things about that moon that the poets and the Tin Pan Alley merchants wouldn't have approved of at all. But they would have approved of the unreserved apology I made to the moon only a couple of minutes later.

I had been inching forward on what was left of my elbows and knees, with my head about nine inches above the ground, when suddenly I saw something else about nine inches above the ground and less than a couple of feet from my eyes. It was a wire, strung above the ground on little steel pins with looped heads, and I hadn't seen it further away because it was painted black. The paint, its low height above the ground, the presence of a dog wandering around and the fact that the wire wasn't strung on insulators made it pretty clear that it wasn't an. electric circuit carrying some kind of lethal current. It was an old-fashioned trip wire. It would be connected up with some mechanical warning device.

I waited twenty minutes without moving until the moon had again gone behind the clouds, rose stiffly to my feet, crossed the wire and got down again. The land had now quite a definite dip to my right, towards the base of the mountain, and the railway track had been raised and banked on one side to meet the angle of the ground. It seemed like a good idea to crawl along beneath the raised edge of the embankment: I would be in shadow if the moon broke through again. Or I hoped I would be.

I was. After almost half-an-hour more of this elbow and knees caper, during which I saw nothing and heard nothing and thought with increasingly sympathetic admiration of the lower members of the animal kingdom who were doomed to spend their lives getting around in this fashion, the moon broke through again. And this time I really saw something.

Less than thirty yards ahead of me I saw a fence. I had seen such fences before and they weren't the kind that surround an English meadow. Where I'd seen them before had been in Korea, round prisoner of war cages. This one was a nine-stranded barbed-wire affair, over six feet high and curving outwards at the top: it emerged from the impenetrable darkness of the vertically-walled cleft in the mountain to my right and ran due south across the plain.

Perhaps ten yards beyond that there was another fence, a duplicate of the first, but what occupied my attention was not either of the fences but a group of three men I could see beyond the second fence. They were standing together, talking, I presumed, but so softly that I couldn't hear what they were saying, and one of them had just lit a cigarette. They were dressed in white ducks, round caps, gaiters and cartridge belts, and carried rifles slung over their shoulders. They were, without any doubt at all, seamen of the Royal Navy.

By this time my mind had given up. I was tired. I was exhausted. I couldn't think any more. Given time, I could maybe have thought up a couple of good reasons why I should suddenly on this remote Fijian island stumble across three seamen of the Royal Navy, but that seemed a daft sort of thing to do when all I had to do was stand up and ask them. I transferred the weight from my elbows to the palms of my hands and started to get to my feet.

Three yards ahead of me a bush moved. Shock froze me into involuntary and life-saving immobility, no relic dug out by the professor was ever half so petrified as I was at that moment. The bush leaned over gently towards another bush and murmured something in so low a voice that I couldn't have heard it another five feet away. But surely they must be hearing me. My heart was reverberating in my ears like a riveter's hammer. It was going about the same speed, too. And even if they couldn't hear me they must surely have felt the vibrations being transmitted through my body and ground, I was as near to them as that, a seismograph could have picked me up in Suva. But they heard nothing, they felt nothing. I lowered myself back to the ground like a gambler laying down the last card that's going to lose him his fortune. I made a mental note that all this stuff about oxygen being necessary for life was a tale invented by the doctors. I had completely stopped breathing. My right hand ached, in the moonlight I could see the knuckles of the fist clenched round the hilt of the knife gleaming like burnished ivory. It took a conscious effort of will to relax the grip even slightly, but even so I still clung on to the handle of that knife harder than I'd ever clung on to anything before.

Seven or eight aeons passed. By and by the three naval guards, who had that liberal interpretation of their duties possessed by naval guards the world over, disappeared. At least they seemed to disappear, until I realised that what I had taken for a dark patch in the ground behind them was really a hut. A minute passed, then I heard the metallic clacking and hissing of a primus stove being pumped into life. The bush in front of me moved again. I twisted the knife in my hand until the blade was pointing up, not down, but he didn't come my way. He crawled off silently, parallel to the wire, heading for another bush about thirty yards away, and I could see that other bush stir as he approached. The place was full of moving bushes that night. I changed my mind about asking the guards what they were doing there. Another night, perhaps. Tonight, the wise man went to bed and thought about things. If I could get to my bed without being chewed to pieces by dogs or knifed by one of Hewell's Chinese, I would think about things.

I made it back to the house in one piece. It took me ninety minutes altogether, half of it to cover the first fifty yards, but I made it.

It was coming on for five in the morning when I raised the corner of the seaward screen and slipped into the house. Marie was asleep, and there seemed to be no point in waking her, bad news could wait. I washed off the boot-black in a basin in the corner of the room, but I was too tired to do anything about rebandaging my arm. I was too tired even to think about things. I climbed into bed and have only the faintest recollection of my head touching the pillow. Even if I had had a dozen arms and each one throbbing with pain as was my left, I don't think they would have kept me awake that night.

CHAPTER SIX

Thursday Noon-Friday 1:30 A.M.

It was after noon when I awoke. Only one wall screen had been pulled up, the one that gave on the lagoon. I could see the green shimmer of water, the white glare of sand, the washed out pastels of the coral and, beyond the lagoon, the darker line of the sea with a cloudless sky above. With three side-screens down there was no through draught and it was stiflingly hot under that thatched roof. But at least it made for privacy. My left arm throbbed savagely. But I was still alive. No hydrophobia.

Marie Hopeman was sitting on a chair by my bed. She was dressed in white shorts and blouse, her eyes were clear and rested, she had colour in her cheeks and altogether just looking at her made me feel terrible. She was smiling down at me and I could see that she had made up her mind not to be sore at me any more. She had a nice face, far nicer than the one she had worn in London. I said: "You look fine. How do you feel?" Original, that was me.

"Right as rain. Fever all gone. Sorry to wake you up like this, but there'll be lunch going in half an hour. The professor had one of his boys make those so that you could get over there." She pointed to where a pair of remarkably well-made crutches lay against a chair. "Or you can have it here. You must be hungry, but I didn't want to wake you up for breakfast."

"I didn't turn in till about six o'clock."

"That explains it." I took my hat off to her patience, to her ability to suppress her curiosity. "How do you feel?"

"I feel awful."

"You look it," she said candidly. "Just not tough at all."

"I'm falling to pieces. What have- you been doing all morning?"

"Been squired around by the professor. I went swimming with him this morning-I think the professor likes going swimming with me-then after we'd had breakfast he took me round a bit and into the mine." She shivered, mock-earnest. "I don't care for the mine very much,"

"Where's your boy-friend now?"

"Away looking for a dog. They can't find it anywhere. The professor's very upset. It seems that this was a particular pet and he was very attached to it."