After maybe twenty seconds more of this, one of the men thumped his fist on the table, jumped to his feet, picked up one of two carbines that I could now see had been propped against a chair, crossed to the faraway set of bars and rattled the butt of the gun against the metal, at the same time shouting out something in an angry voice. I didn’t understand the words but it didn’t need a linguist to understand the meaning. He was asking for silence. He didn’t get it. After a pause lasting maybe three seconds the singing came again, louder and more off-key than ever. Give them time and they’d start in on ‘There’ll Always Be an England’. The man with the carbine shook his head in disgust and disbelief and came wearily back to the table. The situation was beyond him.
It was beyond me too. Maybe if I hadn’t been so tired, or maybe if I’d been someone else altogether, someone, say, about twice as smart as I was, I might have thought of a way to get past or even overpower the guards. But right then all I could think of was that I had one little knife and they had two big guns and that anyway I’d used up all my luck for that night.
I left.
* * *
Marie was sleeping peacefully when I finally got back to our hut and I didn’t wake her at once. Let her sleep as long as she could, she wouldn’t get any more sleep this night, maybe her dark fears of the future were justified after all, maybe she wasn’t going to have any more sleep, ever.
Mentally, physically, emotionally, I was exhausted. Completely exhausted, let down as I’d never been before. On the way out from the mine I’d come to the conclusion that there was one thing and one thing only to do: I’d screwed what little was left of my nerve up to the sticking point to do it and when the doing had proved impossible the reaction had been correspondingly great. What I had planned to do had been to kill both Witherspoon-I still thought of him as that-and Hewell. Not kill them, murder them, murder them as they lay in their beds. Or maybe it was better to say execute them. Obviously, from the tunnel that went clear through to the other side of the island and the armoury in the mine, a full-scale attack was about to be launched on the naval establishment on the other side of the island. With Witherspoon and Hewell dead, it seemed unlikely that the leaderless Chinese would go through with it, and to me, at that moment, the prevention of the attack was the only thing that mattered. It mattered even more than the welfare of the girl asleep beside me, and I could no longer kid myself that my feelings towards her were the same as they’d been three short days ago: but she still came second.
But I hadn’t killed them in their beds for the sufficient reason that neither of them had been in their beds: they’d both been across at the professor’s house, drinking the chilled canned beer that the Chinese boy brought in from time to time, talking in soft voices as they pored over charts. The general and his A.D.C. preparing for D-Day. And D-Day was at hand.
The disappointment, the bitterness of what had seemed the ultimate defeat, had taken the last of the heart from me. I’d withdrawn from the window of the professor’s house and just stood there dully, unthinkingly, careless of the risk of discovery, until after maybe five minutes a few of my brain cells started trudging around again. Then I’d walked heavily back up to the mine-it says much for my state of mind that the thought of repeating my earlier hands and knees crawl up there never entered my head-picked up some R.D.X. fuses and chemical igniters in the armoury, came out again, rummaged around the generating plant until I found a can of petrol and then returned.
Now I got pencil and paper, hooded the torch light and started writing a message in block capitals. It took me only three minutes and when I was finished I was far from satisfied with it, but it would have to do. I crossed the room and shook Marie by the shoulder.
She woke slowly, reluctantly, murmuring something in a drowsy voice, then sat up abruptly in bed. I could see the pale gleam of her shoulders in the dark, the movement as a hand came up to brush tousled hair away from her eyes.
“Johnny?” she whispered. “What is it? What-what did you find?”
“Too damn much. Just let me talk. We have very little time left. Know anything about radio?”
“Radio?” A brief pause. “I did the usual course. I can send Morse, not fast, but-”
“Morse I can manage myself. Do you know what frequency ships’ radio operators use for sending distress messages?”
“S.O.S.’s, you mean? I’m not sure. Low frequency, isn’t it? Or long wave?”
“Same thing. You can’t remember the wave-band?”
She thought for a few moments and I sensed rather than saw the shake of the head in the darkness. “I’m sorry, Johnny.”
“It doesn’t matter.” It did matter, it mattered a very great deal, but I’d been crazy even to hope. “But you’ll know old Raine’s private code, though?”
“Of course.”
“Well, code this message, will you?” I thrust the paper, pencil and torch into her hands. “As quickly as you can.”
She didn’t ask me the purpose of what must have struck her as an idiotic request: she just hooded the torch under the blanket and read the message in a low voice.
RIDEX COMBON LONDON STOP IMPRISONED VARDU ISLAND APPROX 150 MILES SOUTH VTTI LEVU STOP DISCOVERED MURDERED BODIES DR CHARLES FAIRFIELD ARCHAEOLOGISTS PROFESSOR WITHERSPOON DR CARSTAIRS SIX OTHERS STOP BILEX WIVES MISSING SCIENTISTS HELD PRISONER HERE STOP MEN RESPONSIBLE PLANNING ALLOUT ASSAULT DAWN NAVAL INSTALLATION WEST SIDE VARDU STOP SITUATION GRAVE STOP IMPERATIVE AIRBORNE ASSISTANCE IMMEDIATELY BENTALL
The faint glow of the light died as the torch was switched off. For almost twenty seconds there was nothing to be heard but the far-off murmur of the surf on the reef, and when she finally spoke her voice was unsteady.
“You found all this out tonight, Johnny?”
“Yes. They’ve driven a tunnel clear through to the other side of the island. They’ve a well-stocked armoury hidden away in one of the caves, where they keep their blasting explosive. And I heard women’s voices. Singing.”
“Singing!”
“I know it sounds crazy. It must be the scientists’ wives, who else could it be. Get busy on that code. I have to go out again.”
“The code-how are you going to send this message?” she asked helplessly.
“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.”