The Dark Crusader (20 page)

"Professor's radio."

"The professor's-but you're bound to wake him up."

"He isn't asleep. He and Hewell are still talking. I'll have to draw them off. I'd thought first of going up to the north for half a mile or so and setting some delayed action amatol blocks, but that wouldn't work. So I'm going to set the workers' hut on fire. I've got the petrol and fuses here."

"You're crazy." Her voice was still unsteady, but maybe she had something there. "The workers' hut is only a hundred yards from the professor's house. You could let off those amatol blocks a mile away, give yourself plenty of time and-" She broke off and then went on abruptly: "What's all the desperate hurry, anyway? What makes you so certain that they're going to attack at dawn?"

"It's the same answer to everything," I said wearily. "Letting off a few bombs to the north might draw them off all right, but as soon as they came back they'd start wondering where all the fireworks came from. It wouldn't take them any time at all to realise that they must have come from the armoury. The first thing they'll find up there is that a couple of their Chinese guards are missing. It won't take them long to find out where they are. Even if I don't set off bombs their absence is bound to be noticed by dawn at the latest, I imagine. Probably long before that. But we won't be here. If we are, they'll kill us. Me, at any rate."

"You said two guards were missing?" she said carefully. "Dead."

"You killed them?" she whispered. "More or less."

"Oh, God, must you try to be facetious?"

"I wasn't trying to be." I picked up the petrol can, fuse and igniters. "Please code that as quickly as possible."

"You're a strange person," she murmured. "I think you frighten me at times."

"I know," I said. "I should have stood there turning both cheeks at once and let our yellow friends carve me into little ribbons. I just haven't got it in me to be a Christian, that's all."

I dropped down under the back screen, lugging the can with me. Lights still burned in the professor's house. I skirted Hewell's hut and brought up at the back of the long house at the point where the steep-pitched thatch of the roof swept down to within four feet of the ground. I had little hopes of and no interest in burning the house down completely, the huge salt-water butts which stood to the rear of every house precluded any chance of that, but the thatch should make a

tidy enough blaze for all that. Slowly, painstakingly, careful to avoid even the faintest glug-glug from the neck of the can, I poured the petrol on a two foot wide strip of thatch over almost half the length of the roof, stretched out a length of R.D.X. fuse above this, one end going into the saturated thatch, the other into a chemical igniter. I placed the igniter on a small stone held in my hand, tapped it with the base of the knife, held the fuse long enough to feel the sudden warmth of the ignited powder train through its braided cover, then left at once. The empty petrol can I left under the floor of Hewell's house.

Marie was sitting at a table when I got back, a blanket draped over her and the table. From beneath the blanket came a dim yellow glow and even as I carefully lowered the side-screen facing the sea, the lamp went out. She emerged from the blanket and said softly: "Johnny?"

"Me. Finished?"

"Here it is." She handed me a slip of paper. "Thanks." I folded it away in a breast pocket and went on: "The entertainment starts in about four minutes. When Hewell and Witherspoon come ankling by be at the doorway, wide-eyed, clutching your negligee or whatever and asking the usual daft questions appropriate to such occasions. Then you'll turn round and speak into the darkness, telling me to stay where I am, that I'm not fit to go anywhere. After that, get dressed quickly, slacks, socks, shirt or cardigan, everything as dark as you can, cover up as much as you can-, hardly the ideal bathing suit but in night waters you'll look a less appetising snack to the inshore tiger sharks the professor told us about than if you were wearing a bikini. Then take the shark-repellent canisters off the two spare lifebelts and fit them-"

"Swimming?" she interrupted. "We're going swimming? Why?"

"For our lives. Two canisters and one life belt apiece, we'll make better time that way."

"But-but your arm, Johnny? And the sharks?"

"My arm won't be much good to me if I'm dead," I said heavily, "and I'll take the sharks before Hewell any day. Two minutes. I must go."

"Johnny."

"What is it?" I said impatiently.

"Be careful, Johnny."

"I'm sorry." I touched her cheek in the darkness. "I'm pretty clumsy, aren't I?"

"Clumsy is no word for it." She reached up and pressed my hand against her cheek. "Just come back, that's all."

When I got round to the back window of the professor's house, he and Hewell were still pressing on with arrangements for the second front. The conference seemed to be going well. The professor was talking in a low emphatic voice, pointing towards a chart which seemed to be some section of the Pacific, while Hewell's gigantic features cracked into a cold little half-smile from time to time. They were busy, but not too busy to drink their beer. It didn't seem to have any effect on them but it did on me, it suddenly made me realise how dry and parched my throat was. I just stood there, waiting and wishing for two things, a beer and a gun, a beer to do away with my thirst and a gun to do away with Hewell and Witherspoon. Good old Bentall, I thought bitterly, nothing of the common touch about him, whenever he wishes for something it has to be really unattainable. Which once more just showed how wrong I could be: within thirty seconds one of those wishes was mine.

The Chinese boy had just entered the room with fresh supplies for the strategists when the black oblong of window behind Hewell's head became no longer black. A vivid yellow flash suddenly lit the darkness behind the hut of the Chinese- from the professor's house the rear of the hut was invisible- and within five seconds the yellow had given way to a bright orangey red as the flames leaped up fifteen, even twenty feet, overtopping the high ridge-pole of the hut. Petrol and thatch made a combustible combination of some note.

The Chinese boy and the professor saw it in the same instant. For a man who had consumed the amount of beer he seemed to have done I must say the professor didn't spend much time on double-takes. He passed some comment which bore no resemblance to his usual 'Dear me's' and 'God bless my souls', kicked over his chair and took off like a rocket The Chinese boy had been even faster, but as it had cost him a second to lay his tray down on the nearest flat surface, which happened to be the blotter on the open roll-top desk, he arrived at the door at the same instant as Witherspoon. For a moment they jammed in the doorway, the professor made some other comment, not very learned in its nature, and then they were off, Hewell pounding along on their heels.

Five seconds later I was seated at the roll-top desk. I tore open the right-hand door, unhooked from its inside the earpieces and bakelite-bonded transmitting key, leads from both of which led to the back- of the set, clapped the earphones to my head and set the key on the table. There were a knob and a switch placed close together on the set, it seemed logical to suppose that they might be the on-off power switch and the transmitting switch, I turned the one and pressed the other and I was right. At least I'd guessed right for the power switch, the earphones filled at once with a loud insistent crackling, so obviously it drew the receiving antenna into circuit.

Low frequency, Marie had said, she'd thought distress signals went out on low frequency. I stared at the five semi-circular calibrated tuning dials, the middle one of which was already illuminated, gazed at the names of East Asiatic towns marked in English and Chinese and wondered how the hell a man could find out which was long wave and which short.

Whether I could also hear my own transmissions on the earphones I didn't know. I tapped out a few experimental S.O.S.'s but heard nothing. I shifted the switch on the set back to the position I'd found it, tapped the transmitter again, but still nothing. It was then that I caught sight of the small push-pull switch just beyond the key on the bakelite transmitter. I pulled it towards me, made the signal again and this time I heard it come clearly through on the phone. Obviously I could either transmit and receive at the same time or transmit without receiving if I felt like it.

The tuning dials were calibrated in thin black lines to show wavebands but there were no figures to indicate which bands they were. That would have made no difference to an expert operator but it made a crippling difference to me. I peered even more closely, saw that the top two bands were marked KHZ at their outer ends, the lower three MHZ. For several seconds I failed to see their significance, my head was tired now and aching almost as much as my arm, and then, miraculously, I got it. K for kilocycles, M for megacycles. The topmost of the five bands would be the longest wavelength lowest-frequency of the lot. That's where I wanted to be, or at least I hoped it was where I wanted to be. I pushed the left hand knob of a group of what I took to be waveband selector buttons and the top dial came to life as the light behind the centre dial died away.

I turned the station selector dial knob as far left as it would go and started transmitting. I would send out a group of three S.O.S.'s, wait a second, repeat, listen for three or four seconds, move a fraction up the dial and start transmitting again. It was dull work but the beer helped me along.

Ten minutes passed, during which time I must have transmitted on at least thirty different frequencies. Nothing, no acknowledgment at all. Nothing. I glanced at the clock on the wall. One minute to three. I sent out another S.O.S. call. The same answer as all the others.

I was jumping by this time. I could still see the red glare of the fire reflected on the inside walls, but there was no guarantee that Hewell and the professor were going to stay there till the last dying ember turned to charcoal. They might be back any second, or anyone happening by either of the two windows or the open door would be bound to see me, but I didn't see that it mattered very much now, if I couldn't get through on this radio I was finished anyway. What really worried me was whether anyone had yet discovered the two dead men in the mine: that way I would be finished too, only an awful lot quicker. Was somebody already conducting a search because the guards had failed to report, was the professor checking to see if I really was in bed, had anyone found the petrol can under Hewell's house... ? The questions were endless and the answers to all of them held so high a degree of possibility of so high a degree of unpleasantness that I put it all out of my mind. I drank some more beer and got on with the transmitting.

The phones crackled in my ears. I bent right forward, as if that would help to bring me into closer contact with the distant sender, and sent out the distress signal again. Once more the Morse started buzzing my ears, I could make out the individual letters but not the words they spelled out. Akita Maru, Akita Mara, four times repeated. A Japanese ship. A Japanese radio operator. The Bentall luck was running true to form. I moved further across the waveband.

I wondered how Marie was getting on. She would be set to go by now and trying to figure out what on earth had happened to me, she would be looking at the time and knowing that the dawn was only three hours to go, that those three hours might be all the time we had left unless the dead men were discovered, in which case the time would be less. Maybe a great deal less. I kept on sending and composed a little speech I was going to make to Colonel Raine. When I got back. If I got back.

Fast fluent Morse started stuttering through the earphones. First the acknowledgment signal followed by: "U.S. Frigate 'Novair County': position: name?"

A U.S. Frigate! Maybe only a hundred miles away. God, it would be the answer to everything! A frigate. Guns, machine-guns, armed men, everything. Then my elation ebbed a

trifle. Position? Name? Of course, in a genuine S.O.S., position came first, always.

"150 miles south of Fiji," I tapped. "Vardu-"

"Lat. and long.?" the operator cut in. He was sending so fast that I could hardly pick it up.

"Uncertain."

"What ship?"

"No ship. Island. Island of Vardu-"

Again he overrode my transmission.

"Island?"

"Yes."

"Get off the air, you damn fool, and stay off it. This is a distress frequency." With that the transmission ended abruptly.

I could have kicked that damned transmitter all the way into the lagoon. I could have done the same with the duty operator on the 'Novair County'. I could have wept with frustration, but it was far too late for tears. Besides, I could hardly blame him. I sent again on the same frequency, but the operator on the 'Novair County'-it could have been no other-just leaned on his transmitting button and kept on leaning till I gave up. I twisted the selector dial again, but only a fraction. I'd learnt one invaluable thing: I was on the distress frequency. Keep burning, hut, I beseeched it silently, keep burning. For old Bentall's sake, please don't go out. Which was quite a lot to ask considering what I'd done to the hut

It kept burning and I kept transmitting. Within twenty seconds I got another reply, the acknowledgment, then: "S.S. Annandale. Position?"

"Australian registry?" I sent.

"Yes. Position, repeat position." Getting testy and understandably so: when a man's shouting for help he shouldn't first of all enquire into the pedigree of his rescuer. I hesitated for a second before sending, I had to make an immediate impact on the operator or I'd likely get as short shrift as I'd had from the U.S. Navy. The distress frequency is sacrosanct to all nations.

"Special British ^Government investigator John Bentall requesting immediate relay coded message via Portishead radio to Admiralty Whitehall London. Desperately urgent."

"Are you sinking?"

I waited for a few assorted blood vessels to burst but when none did I sent: "Yes." In the circumstances it seemed that it might save a great deal of misunderstanding. "Please prepare receive message." I was almost certain that the glare outside was beginning to die down: there wouldn't be much of the hut left by this time.