The Dark Crusader (35 page)

"It's all right," I said, "they've gone."

Ten minutes later we were all making our way slowly down to the hangar. Brookman was right, I thought dully, it would be a week or more before I could walk properly again, but the navy boys took turns at helping me along, taking almost half my weight.

We came over the last ridge that separated us from the plain. The area round the hangar seemed deserted. A small coasting vessel was just clearing the reef. I heard Fleck curse bitterly, and then saw why: fifty yards out from the pier all you could see of his schooner was her masts and the top of her superstructure. LeClerc thought of everything.

Everyone was talking, talking and trying to joke and laughing, a nervous hysterical kind of laughter, but laughter all the same, you couldn't blame them, when you've been under the shadow of certain death and it suddenly lifts, it has that effect on nearly everybody. The strain of the long night, for the women the long weeks were over, the fear and the horror and the suspense lay behind, the world they'd thought was ended was just beginning again. I looked at the seven scientists and their wives, seeing the wives for the first time ever, and they were smiling and gazing into each other's eyes, each pair linked arm in arm. I couldn't look at them, I had to look away. No more gazing for me into Marie's eyes. But I'd walked arm in arm with her, though, once. Once for about two minutes. It hadn't been much. We might have been given more.

Only Fleck seemed depressed and heavy, only Reck out of all of them. And I didn't think it was because of what had happened to his schooner, not primarily anyway. He had been the only one of them who had ever known Marie, and when he'd called her a nice girl I'd gratuitously insulted him,

And he had a daughter of about the same age. Fleck was sad, he was sad for Marie. Fleck was all right, he'd pay no price for his earlier activities, he'd cleared the slate over and over again.

We came to the hangar. I cocked the gun in my hands and prayed that LeClerc had left an ambush party-or himself- behind to get us when the disappearing vessel had tricked us into thinking they had all gone. But there was no one there. Nor was there in any of the other huts, nothing but every radio set and transmitter smashed beyond repair. We came to the armoury, and I walked in through the open door and looked at the empty cot. I felt the crumpled coat that had served as a pillow and it was still warm. Some instinct made me lift it and under there was a ring. A plain golden ring she'd worn on the fourth finger of her left hand. The wedding ring. I slipped it over my little finger and left.

Griffiths gave instructions for the burial of the dead and then he and Fleck and I made our way slowly to the blockhouse, Fleck half-carrying me. Two armed sailors followed us.

The coaster was beyond the reef now, steering due west. The Black Shrike and Marie. The Black Shrike, carrying with it the threat of millions of ruined lives, of scores of great cities lying in the dust, of more carnage and sorrow and heartbreak than the world had known since time began. The Black Shrike. And Marie. The Marie who had looked into the future and found nothing there. The Marie who had said that one day I would meet up with a situation where my self-belief would be no help to me at all. And the day had come.

Fleck turned the key in the blockhouse door, pushed the Chinese back at the point of his gun, then turned him over to the sailors. We passed inside the second door and switched on the lights. LeClerc had smashed every other transmitting mechanism on the base, but he hadn't smashed the launch console, because he hadn't been able to get at it. He wouldn't have wanted to smash it anyway: for LeClerc did not know that the suicide circuit in the Black Shrike was armed.

We crossed the room, I bent down to switch on the generator and as I did my shirt pocket fell open and I saw for the first time and remembered for the first time, the little note Fleck had given me. I picked it up and smoothed the creases.

There were only a few words altogether. It said:

'Please forgive me Johnny. I've changed my mind about not marrying you-someone has to or you'll be in trouble all your life.

P.S. Maybe I love you a little, too.' Then, at the foot: T.P.S. You and me and the lights of London.'

I folded the note and put it away. I adjusted the periscope above my head and could clearly see the
Grasshopper,
low down on the horizon, a plume of dark smoke trailing behind her, steaming steadily west. I removed the mesh cover over the EGADS destruct button, turned the white square knob 180 degrees then reached over and pushed the 'Commit* button. The light glowed green. The safety clock in the Black Shrike was running out.

Twelve seconds. Twelve seconds it took from the moment of pressing the button until the suicide circuit was fully armed. Twelve seconds. I stared down at my wrist-watch, seeing the sweep second hand jerking steadily forward, wondering vaguely whether the charge would only merely blow the Shrike apart or whether, as Fairfield had suspected, there would be a sympathetic detonation of the solid fuel and the Black Shrike blow itself out of existence. Not that it mattered now. Two seconds. I stared blindly into the eyepiece of the periscope, all I could see was a misted blur, then leaned on the destruct button with all the weight of my arm.

The Black Shrike blew itself out of existence. Even at that distance the violence of the explosion was terrifying, a huge spouting volcano of seething boiling white water that drowned the shattered vessel in a moment of time, then a great fiery column of smoke-tipped flame that reached up a thousand feet into the blue of the morning, and vanished with the moment of seeing. The end of the Black Shrike. The end of everything.

I turned away, Fleck's arm round me, and stumbled out into the sparkling brightness of a new day, and as I did I heard the heavy rumble of the explosion rolling in from the sea and echoing back from the silent hill beyond.

Epilogue

A small dusty man in a small dusty room. That's how I always thought of him, just a small dusty man in a small dusty room.

He'd jumped to his feet when I'd entered, and now he was hurrying round the desk, coming towards me, taking me by my good arm and helping me towards the chair in front of his desk. The royal treatment for the returned hero, I'd have taken long odds that he'd never done anything like this before, he hadn't even bothered to rise from his chair the first time I'd seen Marie Hopeman walk into that room.

"Sit down, sit down, my boy." The grey lined face was alive with concern, the steady watchful green eyes mirrored the worry that this man almost never showed. "My God, Bentall, you look awful."

There was a mirror behind his desk, small, fly-blown and covered with dust like everything else in that room, and he wasn't exaggerating any that I could see. Left arm in a black linen sling, right hand holding the heavy stick that helped me along, bloodshot eyes and pale sunken cheeks with the great livid weal that ran from temple to chin, if I could get into the market quick I could make a fortune hiring myself out to haunt houses.

"I look worse than I really am, sir. I'm just tired, that's all." God only knew how tired I was, I hadn't slept a couple of hours in the two days it had taken me to fly home from Suva.

"Have you had anything to eat, Bentall?" I wondered drily when this room had last seen such a display of solicitude, not since old Raine had taken over the chair behind that desk, I'd bet.

"No, sir. I came straight here after I'd phoned from the airport. I'm not hungry."

"I see." He crossed over to the window and stood there for a few moments, shoulders bent, thin fingers laced behind his back, gazing down at the blurred reflection of the lights on the wet glistening street below. Then he sighed, drew the curtains across the stained, and dusty windows, went and sat down, hands lightly clasped on the desk before him. He said, without any preamble: "So Marie Hopeman is dead."

"Yes," I said. "She's dead."

"It's always the best who go," he murmured. "Always the best. Why couldn't an old useless man like myself have gone instead? But it's never that way, is it? If it had been, my own daughter I couldn't-" He broke off and stared down at his hands. "We'll never see a Marie Hopeman again."

"No, sir. We won't see a Marie Hopeman again."

"How did she die, Bentall?"

"I killed her, sir. I had to."

"You killed her." He said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "I had your cable from the
Neckar.
I've had a rough outline from the Admiralty about what happened on Vardu Island. I know you have done a magnificent job, but I know nothing. Please tell me everything that happened."

I told him everything that had happened. It was a long story, but he heard me out without question or interruption. When I was finished he screwed the heels of his palms into his eyes, then pushed both hands slowly up and back across the high lined forehead, the sparse grey hair.

"Fantastic," he murmured. "I have heard some strange tales in this office, but-" He broke off, reached for his pipe and penknife and started up his excavations again. "A great job, a great job-but what a price. All the speeches, all the thanks in the world can never repay you for what you've done, my boy. And no medals in a job like ours, though I have already arranged that you shall have a very special- um-reward for what you have done, and have it very soon." A little tic at the corner of the mouth, I was supposed to guess from that that he was smiling. "You will, I think, find it positively-ah-staggering."

I said nothing, and he continued: "I have, of course, a hundred and one questions to ask you and you no doubt have one or two pointed questions for a small deception I was forced to practice. But that can all wait for the morning." He glanced at his watch. "Good heavens, it's half-past ten. I've kept you too long, far too long, you look almost dead."

"It's all right," I said.

"It's not all right." He laid down pipe and knife and gave me the up from under look with those iceberg eyes of his. "I have more than a vague idea of what you have suffered, not only physically, what you've been through. After all this, Bentall--do you still wish to continue in the service?"

"More than ever, sir." I tried to smile, but it wasn't worth the pain it cost, so I gave it up. "Remember what you said about that chair of yours before I left-I'd still like to sit in it some day."

"And I'm determined you shall," he said quietly.

"So am I, sir." I put my right hand into the sling to ease my arm. "But that's not the only determination we share."

"No?" A millimetric lift of the grey eyebrows.

"No. We're both of us determined on something else. We're both of us determined that the other will never leave this room alive." I took my hand from the sling and showed him my gun. "That Luger under your seat. Leave it where it is."

He stared at me, his mouth slowly tightening.

"Have you taken leave of your senses, Bentall?"

"No, I just found them again, four days ago." I rose awkwardly to my feet and hobbled round to his side of the desk. My eye and my gun never left him. "Get out of that chair."

"You're overstrained," he said quietly. "You've been through too much-"

I struck him across the face with the barrel of my gun.

"Get out of that chair."

He wiped some blood from his cheek and rose slowly to his feet.

"Lay the chair on its side." He did as he was told. The Luger was there all right, held by a spring clip. "Lift it out with the forefinger and thumb of the left hand. By the point of the barrel. And lay it on the desk."

Once more he did as he was directed.

"Get back to the window and turn round."

"What in the name of God is-"

I took a step towards him, gun swinging. He moved quickly backward, four steps till he felt the curtains behind him, and turned round. I glanced down at the Luger. Heavy silencer, safety catch off, loading indicator registering full. I pocketed my own gun, picked up the Luger and told him to turn round. I hefted the Luger in my hand.

"The staggering reward I was to get very soon, eh?" I asked. "A slug in the middle of the guts from a 7.65 Luger would make anyone stagger. Only I wasn't quite as unsuspecting as the last poor devil you murdered when he was sitting in that chair, was I?"

He exhaled his breath in a long silent sigh, and shook his head, very slowly. "I suppose you know what you're talking about, Bentall?"

"Unfortunately for you, I do. Sit down." I waited till he had straightened the chair and seated himself, then leaned against a corner of the desk. "How long have you been playing this double game, Raine?"

"Whatever on earth are you talking about?" he demanded wearily.

"I suppose you know I'm going to kill you," I said. "With this nice silenced Luger. Nobody will hear a thing. The building is deserted. No one saw me come in: and no one will see me go out. They'll find you in the morning, Raine. Dead. Suicide, they'll say. Your responsibilities were too heavy."

Raine licked his lips. He wasn't saying I was mad any more.

"I suppose you've been engaged in treason all your life, Raine. God knows how you got off with it for so long, I suppose you must be brilliant or they'd have caught on to you years ago. Do you want to tell me about it, Raine?"

The green eyes blazed into mine. I had never before seen such concentrated malignity in a human face. He said nothing.

"Very well," I said, "I'll tell you. I'll tell it as a little short story, a bed-time story before you go to sleep. Listen well, Raine, for it's the last story you'll ever hear before the last sleep you'll ever have.

"Twenty-five years you spent in the Far East, Raine, the last ten as chief of counter-espionage. Running with the hare and chasing with the hounds all the time, I suppose, God alone knows how much tragedy and suffering you caused out there, how many people died because of you. Then two years ago you came home.

"But before you came you were approached by one of the powers for whom you were working while you were supposed to be our counter-espionage chief. They told you they had heard rumours that English scientists were making preliminary investigations into solid fuel as a power source for missiles and rockets. They asked you to find out what you could. You agreed. I don't pretend to know what they promised you, power, money, heaven only knows.