The Dark Crusader (27 page)

"The sailors are expendable, but not the scientists? Is that it?" He didn't answer, so I went on: "Have you any idea where they're intending to take this rocket, the scientists and their wives. The naval officers and ratings, of course, won't be taken anywhere."

"What do you mean?"

"You know damn well what I mean. They're of no further use to LeClerc and will be eliminated." He shook his head in what was more an involuntary shudder than a shake and buried his face in his hands. "Did LeClerc make no mention of his ultimate destination?"

He shook his head again and turned away. He seemed badly upset about something, unwilling to meet my eye, but I couldn't find it in my heart to blame him.

"Russia, perhaps?"

"Not Russia." He stared at the floor. "Wherever it is, it's not Russia. They wouldn't look at this old steam-engine affair."

"They wouldn't-" It was my turn to stare. "I thought this was the most advanced-"

"In the Western world, yes. But in the last few months it's been an open secret among our scientists, but one they're all frightened to talk about, that Russia has developed-or is developing-the ultimate rocket. The photon rocket. Hints dropped by Professor Stanyukovich, the leading Soviet expert on the dynamics of gases, don't leave much room for doubt, I'm afraid. Somehow or other they've discovered the secret of harnessing and storing anti-protons. We know about this anti-matter but have no conception of how to store it. But the Russians have. A couple of ounces of it would take the Black Shrike to the moon."

The implications of this were beyond me: but I agreed that it was unlikely that the Soviets would want the rocket. Red China, Japan? The presence of Chinese workers and LeClerc's Sino-Japanese transmitting set seemed to point that way, but the possibility was that those pointers were far too obvious, there were other countries in Asia-and outside Asia-who would dearly love to lay hands on the Black Shrike. But even more important than the question of what nation could or would want such a rocket was the answer to the question how any nation in the world had known that we were building such a rocket. Far back in my mind the first beginnings of an answer were beginning to shape themselves towards an impossible solution ... I became gradually aware that Hargreaves was speaking again.

"I want to apologise for my stupidity this morning," he was saying hesitantly. "Damn silly of me to persist in saying you were a solid fuel expert. I might have been putting a rope round your neck. I'm afraid I was too upset to think at all, far less think clearly. But I don't think the guard noticed."

"It's all right. I don't think either that the guard noticed."

"You're not going to cooperate with LeClerc?" Hargreaves asked. His hands were clasping and unclasping all the time, his nerves were no match for his brains. "I know you could do it if you wanted."

"Sure I could. A couple of hours with Fairfield's notes, diagrams, coding symbols and examining the actual layout, and I think I could. But time is on our side, Hargreaves- God knows it's the only thing on our side. As far as LeClerc is concerned, the fusing is the key. He won't leave till he gets the key. London knows I'm here, the 'Neckar' may get suspicious over the delay, anything can happen, and anything that can happen can only be to our advantage." I tried to think of anything that could be to our advantage but failed. "So I sit tight. LeClerc suspects I'm an expert on solid fuels: he cannot possibly know."

"Of course," Hargreaves muttered. "Of course. Time is on our side."

He sat down on an empty ammunition box and stared down silently at the floor. He seemed to have lost all inclination to talk. I didn't much feel like talking myself.

A key turned in the door and LeClerc and Hewell came in. LeClerc said: "Feeling better?"

"What do you want?"

"Just wondering whether you might have changed your mind about your alleged ignorance on the subject of solid fuel."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Of course not. Hewell?" The giant came forward and laid a squat leather-covered box on the floor-a tape recorder. "Perhaps you would care to hear the playback of a recent recording we made?"

I rose slowly to my feet and stared down at Hargreaves. His gaze was still fixed on the floor.

"Thank you, Hargreaves," I said. "Thank you very much indeed."

"I had to do it," he said dully. "LeClerc said he would shoot my wife through the back of the head."

"I'm sorry." I touched him on the shoulder. "It wasn't your fault. What now, LeClerc?"

"It's time you saw the Black Shrikes." He stood to one side to let me pass.

* * *

The doors of the hangar were wide open, the lights burning high up near the roof. The rails ran all the way to the back of the hangar.

They were there, all right, the Black Shrikes, stubby pencil-shaped cylinders with highly-polished steel sides and water-cooled porcelain noses above great scalloped air-scoops, the height of a two-storey house and perhaps four feet in diameter. They rested on flat eight-wheeled steel bogies, and on either side of each rocket was a gantry crane, almost as high as the rocket itself, each crane mounted on a four-wheeled bogie: from the top and bottom of the gantries protruding clamps reached out to hold the rockets firmly in position. Both rockets and all four gantries were resting on the same set of rails.

LeClerc wasted no time, no words. He led me straight to the nearest rocket and mounted an open-sided lift fitted to the inner side of the nearest gantry. Hewell jabbed me painfully in the spine with his gun: I got the idea and climbed up beside LeClerc. Hewell stayed where he was. LeClerc pressed a button, an electric motor whined and the lift slid easily upward for about five feet. LeClerc took a key from his pocket, slid it into a tiny hole in the side of the rocket, pulled out a flush-fitting handle and swung out a seven-foot high door in the casing of the Black Shrike: the door had been so meticulously machined, so beautifully fitted, that I hadn't even noticed its existence.

'Take a good look," LeClerc said. "That's all you're here for-to take a good look."

I took a good look. The outer hardened steel casing of the rocket was just that and no more-an outer case. Inside was another casing and the gap between the two was at least five inches.

Directly opposite me, welded on to the inner casing, were two flat steel boxes, about six niches apart and each six inches square. The one to the left, green-painted, bore the legend 'Propellant' and below that the words 'On-Off: the one to the right was a bright pillar-box red in colour, with the words 'Safe' and 'Armed' stencilled in white on the left and right side of the box respectively. On both boxes, just below the top, was a knob-handled switch.

From the foot of both boxes issued flexible armoured cables, with plastic sheathing below the armour-a measure almost certainly designed to protect the underlying electric cables from the tremendous heat which would be generated in flight. The cable to the left, coming from the box marked 'Propellant,' was almost an inch and a half in diameter: the other was half an inch in diameter. The former ran down the inner casing and, about three feet away from the box, split into seven separate cables, each one covered in the same plastic and armour: the latter crossed the gap to the outer casing and disappeared upwards out of sight.

There were two other cables. One, a small half-inch cable, joined the two boxes: the second, two inches in diameter, bridged the gap between the 'Propellant' box and a third box, larger than either of the other two, which was fitted to the inside of the outer wall. This third box had a hinged door facing me, secured by a couple of butterfly nuts: no other electric cables led either to or from it

And that was all that was to be seen. I saw it all in ten seconds. LeClerc looked at me and said: "Got it?" I nodded and said nothing.

"The photographic memory," he murmured cryptically. He closed the door, locked it, pressed the lift button and we hummed upwards again for about six feet. Once more the routine with the key, the opening of a door-much smaller this time, barely two feet in height, the invitation to inspect.

This time there was even less to see. A circular gap in the inner casing, a view beyond the gap of what appeared to be fifteen or twenty round pipes narrowing towards their tips and, in the centre of those pipes, the top of some cylindrical object, about six inches in diameter, which vanished down among the tubes. In the centre of the top of this cylinder was a small hole, less than half an inch across. Attached to the outer casing was an armoured cable of the same dimensions as the one which had issued from the box marked 'Safe' and 'Armed', and it seemed a pretty fair guess that it was the same cable. The end of this cable, which was tipped with a solid copper plug, bent right over and hung slackly downwards in the gap between the outer and inner casings. It seemed logical to suppose that this copper plug was intended to fit into the hole in the central cylinder but here, it would seem, logic would have been in error: the hole in the cylinder was at least four times the size of the narrow copper plug.

LeClerc closed the door, pressed the button, and the lift dropped down to the foot of the gantry. Another door, another key and this time a view of the very base of the rocket, a foot below where the last of the pipes in the inner casing ended. There was no impression of a confusion of pipes here as there had been at the top: everything was mathematically neat and completely' symmetrical, nineteen cylinders all of which seemed to be sealed with a heavy plastic compound, each cylinder about seven inches in diameter, eighteen of them arranged in two concentric circles about an inner core. The cylinders, which completely filled the inner casing, were not entirely smoothsided: at various distances above their lower ends they were smoothly indented in their sides, and those indentations, it was no trick at all to guess, were for the purpose of introducing the leads which hung in an untidy bunch between the two casings. I counted the leads, nineteen in all, breaking out from the seven armoured cables leading from the 'Propellant' box above: a pair of leads from each of three cables, three leads from each of the other three cables and four leads from the remaining cable.

"You have it all, Bentall?" LeClerc asked.

"I have it all," I nodded. It seemed simple enough.

"Good." He closed the door, led the way towards the hangar entrance. "Now to have a look at Fairfield's notebooks, codes and references. At least we were able to save those."

I raised an eyebrow-it was one of the few muscular exercises I could perform without causing myself pain.

"There were some things you couldn't save?"

"The complete set of blue-prints for the rocket. I must confess we did not think that the British would have had the intelligence to take such precautions. They were in the lower half of a sealed metal box-a standard war-tune device, much faster and more foolproof than burning-the top half of which was a glass tank of concentrated hydrochloric with a metal plunger. The plunger was depressed, the glass broken and the acid released before we realised what was happening."

I remembered the captain's bleeding and battered face.

"Good old Captain Griffiths. So now you're completely dependent on having a working model of the rocket, eh?"

"That's so." If LeClerc was worried, he didn't show it. "Don't forget we still have the scientists."

He led me to a hut just beyond the armoury, a hut rather primitively fitted out as an office, with filing cabinets, a typewriter and a plain wooden desk. LeClerc opened the cabinet, pulled out the top drawer and dumped a pile of papers on the table.

"I understand that those are Fairfield's papers, all of them. I'll come back in an hour."

"Two hours at least: probably more."

"I said an hour."

"All right." I rose from the chair where I'd just seated myself and pushed the papers to one side. "Get someone else to work the damn thing out."

He looked at me for a long moment, the slaty milky eyes without expression, then said evenly: "You take very many chances, Bentall."

"Don't talk rubbish." If I couldn't do anything else I could at least sneer at him. "When a man takes chances he can either win or lose. I can't possibly win anything now, and God knows I've nothing to lose."

"You're wrong, you know," he said pleasantly. "There is something you can lose. I can take your life away from you."

"Have it and welcome." I tried to ease the burning pain in my shoulder and arm. "The way I feel right now I'm just about finished with it anyway."

"You have a remarkable sense of humour," he said acidly. Then he was gone, banging the door shut behind him. He didn't forget to turn the key in the lock.

Half an hour passed before I even bothered looking at Fairfield's papers, I'd more important things to think about than those. It was not the most pleasant half-hour of my life. The evidence was all before me now, Bentall with the bunkers off-at last-and I knew the truth, also at last. Counterespionage, I thought bitterly, they should never have let me out of the kindergarten, the wicked world and its wicked ways were far too much for Bentall, if he could put one foot in front of the other without breaking an ankle in the process that was all you could reasonably expect of him. On flat ground, of course. By the time I'd finished thinking, my morale and self-respect had shrunk so much you'd have required an electronic microscope to find them, so I reviewed all that had happened in the hope of discovering one instance where I had been right, but no, I'd a perfect and completely unmarred record, one hundred per cent wrong all along the line. It was a feat that not many people could have matched.

The one redeeming feature about being utterly wrong, of course, was that I'd also been wrong about Marie Hopeman. She had had no special instructions from Colonel Raine, she had never fooled me once. This was no mere hunch or opinion, it was a provable certainty. It was, I knew, rather late in the day to arrive at this knowledge, I couldn't see that it was going to alter anything now, but in different circumstances ... I gave myself up to the very pleasant contemplation of what things might have been like in different circumstances and was just finishing off the towers and battlements of a particularly enchanting dream castle in the air when a key turned in the lock. I'd barely time to open the folder and scatter a few papers around before LeClerc and a Chinese guard came in. He glanced down at the table, Malacca cane swinging idly in his hand.