Two other much narrower sets of rails ran up the pier. A few years ago, I supposed; one of those would have brought loaded phosphate wagons down to the pierhead while the other took the empty ones away. Today, one could still see one of the original sets of lines as it left the pier curving away to the south, rusted and overgrown, towards the phosphate mine: but the other set had been removed and replaced by new lengths of fresh shining rail that led straight inland for a distance of perhaps two hundred yards. Halfway along its length it passed over a curious circular pad of concrete about twenty-five yards in diameter, and finally ended in front of a hangar-shaped building, about thirty feet high, forty wide and a hundred in length. From where we stood almost directly behind the hangar it was impossible to see either its doors or where the rails ended, but it was a safe guess that the latter went all the way inside. The hangar itself was dazzling, it appeared to have been painted m pure white: but it was covered not in paint but in a painted white canvas, a measure, I supposed, designed to reflect the sun’s rays and make work possible inside a building made of corrugated iron.
Some little distance north of this stood what were clearly the living-quarters, a group of haphazardly placed buildings, squat, ugly and obviously prefabricated. Further to the north again, at a distance of almost three-quarters of a mile from the hangar, was what seemed to be a solid square of concrete set into the ground. At that distance it was hard to tell, but it didn’t look to be any more than two or three feet high. At least half a dozen tall steel poles rose from this concrete, each pole topped with a meshed scanner or radio antenna, all different in design.
Hang led us straight to the nearest and largest of the prefabricated huts. There were two men outside, Chinese, both with automatic carbines. One of them nodded, and Hang stood aside to let us pass through the open door.
The room beyond was obviously the rating’s mess. Fifteen feet wide by forty long, it had three-tiered bunks arranged the full length of both walls, with walls and bunks liberally decorated with pin-ups in every shape and form. Between each pair of vertical trios of bunks was a three part locker. More art. Four mess tables, joined end to end to make one table and scrubbed as snowy white as the floor they stood on, ran the full length of the room. Set in the far wall of the room was a door. The sign above it read: ‘P. O’s Mess’.
On the benches round the two most distant tables sat about twenty men, petty officers and ratings. Some were fully dressed, others hardly dressed at all. One was slumped across the table, like a man asleep, his head pillowed on his bare forearms, and his forearms and the table below covered with clotted blood. None of the men looked shocked or scared or worried, they just sat there with tight and angry faces. They didn’t look the type to scare easily, there were no kids among them, the Navy would have picked its best, its most experienced men for this operation, which probably explained why Hewell and his men, even with the elements of surprise and ambush on their side, had run into trouble.
Four men sat side by side on a bench by the top table. Like the men at the lower tables they had their hands clasped in front of them, resting on the wood. Each man had his epaulettes of rank on his shoulders. The big grey-haired man on the left with the puffed and bleeding mouth, the grey watchful eyes and the four gold bars would be Captain Griffiths. Beside him a thin balding hook-nosed man with three bars spaced by purple, an engineer commander. Next to him a blond young man with red between his two gold bars, that would be Surgeon-Lieutenant Brookman: and finally another lieutenant, a red-haired youngster with bitter eyes and a white compressed line where his mouth should have been.
Five Chinese guards were spaced round the walls of the room. Each carried an automatic carbine. By the head of the first table, smoking a cheroot, with a malacca cane-no gun-in his hand and looking more benign and scholastic than ever, was the man I had known as Professor Wither-spoon. Or so I thought until he turned and looked directly at me and then I saw, even although there was no particular expression on his face, that I could be wrong about the benign part of it. For the first time ever I saw him without the tinted glasses, and I didn’t like what I saw: eyes with the lightest pupils I had ever seen, but misted, eyes with the flat dull look of inferior coloured marbles. They were almost the eyes you sometimes see on men who are completely blind.
He glanced at Hewell and said: “Well?”
“Well,” Hewell said. Every man in the room, except the red-haired lieutenant, was staring at him. I’d forgotten the impact that the first sight of this moving Neanderthalic mountain could make. “We got them. They were suspicious and waiting, ,but we got them. I lost one man.”
“So.” Witherspoon turned to the captain. “That accounts for everyone?”
“You murdering fiends,” the grey-haired man whispered. “You fiends! Ten of my men killed.”
Witherspoon gave a slight signal with his cane and one of his guards stepped forward and placed his carbine barrel against the back of the neck of the rating next to the one who lay with his head pillowed on his arms.
“That’s all,” Captain Griffiths said quickly. “I swear that is all.”
Witherspoon gave another signal and the man stepped back. I could see the white mark where the gun had been Dressing in the man’s neck, the slow droop of the shoulders as he exhaled in a long soundless breath. Hewell nodded at the dead man beside him.
“What happened?”
“I asked this young fool here”-Witherspoon pointed at the red-haired lieutenant-“where all the guns and ammunition were stored. The young fool wouldn’t tell me. I had that man there shot. Next time I asked he told me.”
Hewell nodded absently as if it were the most right and natural thing in the world to shoot a man if another withheld information, but I wasn’t interested in Hewell, I was interested in Witherspoon. The absence of spectacles apart, he hadn’t changed externally at all: but for all that the change was complete. The quick bird-like movements, the falsetto affected voice, the repetitive habit of speech had vanished: here now was a calm assured ruthless man, absolute master of himself and all around him, a man who never wasted an action or a word.
“Those the scientists?” Witherspoon went on.
Hewell nodded and Witherspoon waved his cane towards the far end of the room.
“They’re in there.”
Hewell and a guard started to shepherd the seven men towards the P. O’s mess. As they passed by Witherspoon, Farley stopped and stood before him with clenched hands.
“You monster,” he said thickly. “You damned-”
Witherspoon didn’t seem even to look at him. His malacca cane whistled through the air and Farley screamed in agony and staggered back against the bunks, clutching his face with both hands. Hewell caught him by the collar and sent him staggering and stumbling the length of the room. Witherspoon never even looked at him. I had the vague idea that Witherspoon and I weren’t going to get along very well in the near future.
The door at the far end opened, the men were bundled inside and then the door was closed again, but not before we all heard the high-pitched excited disbelieving voices of women.
“So you kept them under wraps while the Navy was doing your work for you,” I said slowly to Witherspoon. “Now that you no longer need the Navy but do need the scientists-no doubt to supervise and develop the building of fresh rockets wherever you’re going-well, you need the wives too. How else could you make their husbands work for you?”
He turned to face me, the long thin whippy cane swinging gently in his hand. “Who asked you to speak?”
“You hit me with that cane,” I said, “and I’ll choke out your life with it.”
Everything was suddenly peculiarly still. Hewell, on his way back, halted in mid-stride. Everybody, for some reason best known to himself, had stopped breathing. The thunder of a feather falling on the floor would have had them all airborne. Ten seconds, each second about five minutes long, passed. Everyone was still holding his breath. Then Wither-spoon laughed softly and turned to Captain Griffiths^.
“I’m afraid Bentall here is of a rather different calibre from your men and our scientists,” he said, as if in explanation. “Bentall is, for instance, an excellent actor: no other man has ever fooled me so long or so successfully. Bentall allows himself to be savaged by wild dogs and never shows a sign. Bentall, with one arm out of commission, meets up with two experienced knife-fighters in a darkened cave and kills them both. He is also, for good measure, highly skilled in burning down houses.” He shrugged, almost apologetically. “But, then, of course, it requires a very special man to become a member of Britain’s Secret Service.”