elbow, a man whose expression clearly showed that his mind had given up
trying to cope. It was understandable enough.
“Conventional explosive with a time setting. I think it’s meant to
blow up the twister in sympathetic detonation if the twister’s own time
mechanism doesn’t work. Frankly, I don’t know. The thing is that even
this could sink the ticonderoga.”
“Couldn’t we couldn’t we just heave it over the side?”
he asked nervously. “Not safe, sir. About due to go off and the
jar of its hitting the water might be just enough to trigger off the
clock. It would blow a hole the size of a barn through the side of your
ship…. You might get someone to unscrew the third lid too.”
I looked at my watch again. Fifteen minutes to seven. The campari
was already hardly more than a dark smudge far down on the lightening
horizon to the east, six, perhaps seven miles away. A fair distance
off, but not far enough.
the lid was clear of the second coffin. I pulled back the covering
blankets, located the primer and the two slender leads to the inset
detonator, and gingerly sliced through these, one at a time, with a
knife. Just to be on the safe side, I threw detonator and primer over
the side. Two minutes later i’d rendered the time bomb in the third
coffin equally harmless. I looked round the afterdeck; if those people
had any sense, the place should have been deserted by now. No one
seemed to have stirred an inch.
“Mr. carter,” bullen said slowly. He’d stopped glaring at me. “I
think perhaps you owe us a little explanation. This business of dr.
Caroline, the coffins, the-the substitutions.
so I gave it to him, highly condensed, while everybody crowded
round, and at the end he said, “and I think maybe I might owe you a
small apology.” contrite, but not going overboard about it. “But I
can’t get the thought of the twister out of my head-the twister and the
campari. She was a good ship, mister. Damn it, I know carreras is a
villain, a monster, a man surrounded by cutthroats. But did you have to
do it this way? to condemn them all to death? forty lives on your
hands?”
“Better than a hundred and fifty lives on carreras’ hands,” julius
beresford said sombrely. “Which is what it would have been but for our
friend here.”
“Couldn’t be done, sir,” I said to bullen. “The twister was armed
and locked in position. Carreras has the key. The only way to render
that bomb safe would be to tell carreras and let him unlock it. If we’d
told him before he’d left here, sure, he’d have disarmed it, then he
would have killed every man and woman on the ticonderoga. You can bet
what you like that the generalissimo’s last instruction was: ‘no one
must live to talk about this.'”
“It’s still not too late,” bullen said insistently. He wasn’t
giving a damn about carreras, but he loved the campari.
“Once we’re under way there’s no chance of his being able to board
us again and kill us, even assuming he comes after us. We can dodge
whatever shells”
“One moment, sir,” I interrupted. “How do we warn him?”
“By radio, man, by radio! there’s still six minutes. Get a
message”
“The ticonderoga’s transmitters are useless,” I said wearily.
“They’re smashed beyond repair.”
“What?” brace caught my arm. “What? smashed? how do you know?”
“Use your head,” I said irritably. “Those two bogus wireless
operators were under orders to wreck the transmitters before they left.
Do you think carreras wanted you sending out soss all over the atlantic
the moment he took off?”
“The thought hadn’t even occurred to me.” brace shook his head and
spoke to a young officer. “On the phone. You heard. Cheek.”
he checked and was back in thirty seconds, his face grave. “He’s
right, sir. Completely smashed.”
“Our friend carreras,” I murmured. “His own executioner.”
two seconds later and five minutes ahead of schedule the campari
blew itself out of existence. She must have been at least thirteen
miles away; she was well hull-down over the horizon, and the high square
bulk of the ticonderoga’s raised poop lay in our direct line of sight,
but, for all that, the searing blue-white glare that was the heart of
the exploding bomb struck at our cringing wounded eyes with all the
strength of a dozen noonday suns while it momentarily highlit the
ticonderoga in blinding white and shadows blacker than night, as if some
giant searchlight had been switched on only yards away. The intense
whiteness, the murderous dazzlement, lasted no more than the fraction of
a second though its imprint on the eye’s retina lasted many times longer
and was replaced by a single bar-straight column of glowing red fire
that streaked up into the dawn until it pierced the cloud above; and,
following that, a great column of boiling seething-white water surged up
slowly from the surface of the sea, incredibly slowly, seemed to reach
halfway up to the clouds, then as slowly began to fall again. What
little was left of the shattered and vaporised campari would have been
in that gigantic waterspout. The campari and carreras.
from birth to death that waterspout must have taken a full minute,
and it was only seconds after it had vanished and the eastern horizon
became clear again that the single flat thunderclap of sound followed by
the deep, menacing rumble of the after-explosion and accompanying shock
waves came at us over the surface of the sea. Then all was silence,
profound and deathly.
“Well, dr. Caroline,” I said conversationally, “at least you have
the satisfaction of knowing that the damned thing works.”
he didn’t take me up on my conversational gambit. No one took me
up on it. They were all waiting for the tidal wave, but no tidal wave
came. After a minute or two a long, low, very fast-moving swell bore
down on us from the east, passed under the ticonderoga, made her pitch
heavily perhaps half a dozen times, and then was gone. It was captain
brace who was the first of all of them to find his voice.
“That’s it, then, captain bullen. All gone up in smoke. Your ship
and my one hundred and fifty million dollars in gold.”
z “just the ship, captain brace,” I said. “Just the ship. As
for the twenty vaporised generators, i’m sure the united states
government will gladly recompense the harms worth and holden electrical
engineering company.”
he smiled faintly; heaven knows he couldn’t have felt like smiling.
“There were no generators in those crates, mr. carter. Gold
bullion for fort knox. How that devil carreras
“You knew there was gold in those crates?” I asked. “Of course I
did. Rather, I knew we had it on board. But there had been a mistake
in marking the crates. So much damned secrecy, I suppose, that one hand
didn’t know what the other hand was doing. According to my manifest,
the crates of gold were the forward twenty on the upper deck, but an
admiralty message last night informed me of the mistake that had been
made. Rather it informed those damned renegades of radio operators.
Never showed it to me, of course. They must have radioed the news to
carreras, and the first thing they did when they tied up alongside was
to give him the written message itself as confirmation. He gave it to
me as a souvenir,” he added bitterly. He held out his hand with the
form in it. “Want to see it?”
“No need.” I shook my head. “I can tell you word for word what’s
in that cable. ‘highest priority urgent immediate repeat immediate
attention master fort ticonderoga: grave error in loading manifest:
special cargo not repeat not in forward twenty crates forward deck
marked turbines nashville tennessee but repeat but in forward twenty
crates afterdeck marked generators oak ridge tennessee: indications you
may be running into hurricane essential secure afterdeck cargo earliest:
from the office of the minister of transport by hand of vice-admiral
richard hodson director naval operations.'”
captain brace stared at me. “How in the name of
“Miguel carreras also had a manifest in his cabin,” I said.
“Marked and correctly exactly the same as yours. I saw it. That
radio message never came from london. It came from me. I sent it from
the wireless office of the campari at two o’clock this morning.” it was
a long silence indeed that followed; predictably enough, it was Susan
beresford who finally broke it. She moved across to bullen’s stretcher,
looked down at him, and said, “captain bullen, I think you and I both
owe mr. carter a very great apology.”
“I think we do, miss beresford. I think we do indeed.” he tried
to scowl, but it didn’t quite come off. “But he told me to shut up,