“Damn you, Hewell, let me go!” LeClerc’s voice was hardly more than a whisper, the trembling whisper of anger out of control. “Take your hand away, I tell you!”
“Stop it, boss.” The deep authoritative boom brought normalcy, everyday sanity, back into the blockhouse. “Can’t you see the guy’s half-dead already. Do you want to kill him? Who’s going to fuse up the rocket then?”
There was a few seconds’ silence, then LeClerc, in a completely changed tone, said: “Thank you, Hewell. You’re quite right, of course. But I had provocation.”
“Yeah,” Hewell said in his gravelly voice. “You had at that. A clever-clever alec. I’d like to break his goddamned neck, myself.”
I wasn’t among friends, that was clear enough. But I wasn’t worrying about them at that moment, I wasn’t even thinking about them, I was too busy worrying and thinking about myself. My left arm and the left side of my face were engaged in a competition to see which could make me jump more and the competition was fierce, but after a while they gave it up and joined forces and the whole left side of my body seemed to merge into one vast agonising pain. I was staring down at the launch console and the various buttons were swimming into focus and out again, one moment gone, the next hopping around like a trayful of jumping beans. Hewell hadn’t exaggerated any, if there was one thing that was certain it was that I couldn’t take much more of this. I was just slowly coming to pieces. Or perhaps not so slowly.
I heard voices, but whether the voices were directed at me or not I didn’t know. I stumbled against a stool and sat down heavily, clinging to the launch console to keep myself from falling.
The voices came again, and this time I could distinguish LeClerc’s. He had advanced to within a couple of feet of me, the cane held in both hands, the backs of his thumbs gleaming white as if he were holding himself in check with an effort, as though he were trying to snap the cane in half.
“Do you hear me, Bentall,” he said in a low cold voice that I liked even less than his hysterical outburst of a moment ago. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
I stared down at the blood dripping to the concrete floor.
“I want the doctor,” I mumbled. My jaws, my mouth were swelling, stiffening up already and I found speech difficult. “My wounds have opened up again.”
“The hell with your wounds.” The Good Samaritan to the life. “You’re going to start on that rocket and you’re going to start on it now.”
“Ah!” I said. I forced myself to sit straight, and half-shut my eyes until I had him more or less in focus, like an image and six ghosts on a badly-adjusted TV screen. “How are you going to make me? Because you’ll have to make me, you know. How? Torture? Bring out the old thumb screws and see if Bentall cares.” I was half out of my mind with pain, I didn’t know what I was saying. “One turn of the rack and Bentall is in a better world. Besides, I wouldn’t feel it anyway. And a hand like mine, trembling like a leaf!” I held it up to let him see it trembling like a leaf. “How do you expect me to fuse a tricky-”
He gave me the back of his hand across my mouth, not lightly.
“Shut up,” he said coldly. Florence Nightingale would have loved him, he’d exactly the right touch with sick men. “There are other ways. Remember when I asked that stupid young lieutenant a question and he refused to answer? Remember?”
“Yes.” It seemed about a month ago but it had been only a few hours. “I remember. You shot a man through the back of the head. The next time the lieutenant did what you wanted.”
“Just like you’re going to. I’m having a sailor brought here and I’m going to ask you to fuse that rocket. If you won’t, I’ll have him shot.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that!”
“You will, eh?”
He didn’t answer, just summoned and spoke to one of the men. The Chinese nodded, turned away and hadn’t gone five steps when I said to LeClerc: “Call him back.”
“That’s better,” LeClerc nodded. “You’re going to cooperate?”
“Tell him to bring all the other ratings with him. And all the officers. You can shoot the lot of them through the head. See if I care.”
LeClerc stared at me.
“Are you quite mad, Bentall?” he demanded at last. “Don’t you realise that I mean what I say?”
“And I mean what I say,” I answered tiredly. “You forget what I am, LeClerc. I’m a counter-espionage agent and humanitarian principles don’t matter a damn to me. You should know that better than anyone. Besides, I know damn well that you’re going to murder them all before you leave here. If they shuffle off twenty-four hours ahead of schedule, then what the hell? Go ahead and waste your ammunition.”
He looked at me in silence while the seconds passed, while my heart thudded heavily, painfully in my chest, while the palms of my hands grew moist, then turned away. He believed me all right, it was so exactly the way his own ruthless criminal mind would work. He spoke quietly to Hewell, who left with a guard, then turned back to me.
“Everybody has their Achilles’ heel, Bentall,” he said conversationally. “I believe you love your wife.”
The heat inside that reinforced concrete blockhouse was sweltering, over-hot, but I felt myself turn as cold as if I had just stepped into an ice-box. For a moment all the fierceness of the pain left me and all I could feel were goose-pimples running down my arms and back. My mouth was suddenly dry and I could feel deep in my stomach that hellish incapacitating nausea that can spring only from fear. And I was afraid, afraid with a fear I had not before known: I could feel this fear, I could feel it in my hands, I could taste it in my mouth and the taste was the taste of all the unpleasant things I had ever tasted: I could smell it in the air and the smell was an amalgam of all the evil odours I had ever known. God, I should have known this was coming, I thought of her face twisted in pain, the hazel eyes dark in agony, it was the most obvious thing in the world. Only Bentall could have missed it.
“You poor fool,” I said contemptuously. It was hard to get the words past my dry mouth and swollen lips, far less inform them with the appropriately scornful tones, but 1 managed it. “She’s not my wife. Her name is Marie Hope-man and I met her for the first time exactly six days ago.”
“Not your wife, eh?” He didn’t seem vastly surprised. “A fellow-employee of yours, one assumes?”
“One assumes correctly. Miss Hopeman is fully aware of the risks involved. She has been a professional government agent for many years. Don’t threaten me with Miss Hopeman or she’ll laugh in your face.”
“Quite so, quite so. An agent, you say. The British Government is to be congratulated, the level of pulchritude among female agents is apt to be dismally low and Miss Hopeman does much to correct the balance. An astonishingly lovely young lady and one whom I, personally, find quite charming.” He paused fractionally. “Since she is not your wife you will not mind so much if she accompanies the other ladies towards our destination?”
He was watching me closely to get my reaction, he didn’t have to spell it out for me, but he didn’t get the reaction. He had a pistol in his right hand now and what with that and the guard’s automatic carbine pointing at my middle, there was nothing to be gained by reacting in the only way I felt like, so I said instead: “Destination? What destination would that be, LeClerc? Asia?”
“That should be obvious, I thought.”
“And the rocket? Prototype for a few hundreds more?”
“Exactly.” He seemed ready to talk, as all men are ready to talk about their obsessions. “Like many Asiatic nations my adopted country has a genius more, shall we say, for refined imitation than original invention. In six months we shall be turning them out in quantity. Rockets, Bentall, are today’s bargaining counters at the table of world politics. We need lebensraum for what the papers of the world are pleased to call our teeming millions. The desert of Australia could be made to blossom like a rose. We should like to move in there, peacefully, if possible.”
I stared at him. He’d gone off his rocker.
“Lebensraum? Australia? My God, you’re mad. Australia! You couldn’t catch up with the military potential of Russia or America in a lifetime.”