sun-weathered face, bespoke a confidence, a certainty, an unshakeable
belief that was most impressive. There now, I thought, was a man who
would have made a great salesman.
“I don’t think, miss beresford.” again the grave smile. “I know.
Our troubles are almost at their end. Do what I do put your last cent
on mr. carter here.”
he even had me convinced. I, too, knew that everything was going
to turn out just fine, until I remembered who he was depending on. Me.
I gave susan a handkerchief and said, “go and tell archie about that
job.”
“You’re not going to trust your life to that thing?” there was
horror in susan’s face, panic in her voice as she watched me tie a
bowline round my waist. “Why, it’s no thicker than my little finger.”
I could hardly blame her: that thin three stranded rope, no bigger than
an ordinary clothesline, was hardly calculated to inspire confidence in
anyone. It didn’t inspire much in me, even although I did know its
properties.
“It’s nylon, miss,” macdonald explained soothingly. “The very rope
mountaineers use in the himalayas-and you don’t think they’d trust their
lives to anything they weren’t dead sure of? you could hang a big
motorcar on the end of this and it still wouldn’t break.” susan gave
him her it’s -all-right for you to talk when it’snot your life that’s
depending on-it look, bit her lip, and said nothing. The time was
exactly midnight. If i’d read the clock dial settings on the twister
properly, six hours was the maximum delayed action that could be
obtained. Assuming carreras rendezvoused exactly on time at 5 a.m., it
would be at least another hour before he could get clear; so the twister
wouldn’t be armed until after midnight. Everything was ready. The
sick-bay door had been cautiously locked on the inside with the key i’d
taken from tony carreras so that neither of the two guards could burst
in unexpectedly in the middle of things. And even if they did get
suspicious and force an entrance, macdonald had a gun.
macdonald himself was now sitting at the top of my bed, beside the
window. Marston and I had half carried him there from his own bed. His
left leg was quite useless like myself, he’d been given an injection by
doc marston to deaden the pain, mine being twice as powerful as the
previous night’s dose but then macdonald was not going to be called upon
to use his leg that night, only his arms and shoulders, and there was
nothing wrong with macdonald’s arms and shoulders. They were the
strongest on the campari. I had the feeling I was going to need all
their strength. Only macdonald knew the purpose I had in mind. Only
macdonald knew that I intended returning the way I went. The others
believed in my suicidal plan for an attack on the bridge, believed if I
were successful I would be returning via the sick-bay door. But they
didn’t believe I would return at all. The atmosphere was less than
festive.
bullen was awake now, lying flat on his back, his face silent and
grim.
I was dressed in the same dinner suit as i’d worn the previous
night. It was still damp, still crusted with blood. I’d no shoes on.
The clasp knife was in one pocket, oil skin wrapped torch in the other,
the mask round my face, hood over my head. My leg ached, I felt as a
man feels after a long bout of flu, and the fever still burned in my
blood, but I was as ready as I was ever going to be. “Lights,” I said
to marston.
a switch clicked and the sick bay was as dark as the tomb. I drew
back the curtains, pulled open the window, and secured it on the latch.
I stuck my head outside.
it was raining steadily, heavily, a cold driving rain out of the
northwest, slanting straight in through the window on to the bed. The
sky was black with no star above. The campari still pitched a little,
rolled a little, but it was nothing compared to the previous night. She
was doing about twelve knots. I twisted my neck and peered upwards. No
one there. I leaned out as far as possible and looked fore and aft. If
there was a light showing on the campari that night, I couldn’t see it.
I came inside, stooped, picked up a coil of nylon rope, checked
that it was the one secured to the iron bedstead, and flung it out into
the rain and the darkness. I made a last check of the rope knotted
round my waist-this was the one the bo’sun held in his hands-and said,
“i’m off.” as a farewell speech it could perhaps have been improved
upon, but it was all I could think of at the time. Captain bullen said,
“good luck, my boy.” he’d have said an awful lot more if he knew what I
really had in mind. Marston said something I couldn’t catch. Susan
said nothing at all. I wriggled my way through the window, favouring my
wounded leg, and then was fully outside, suspended from the sill by my
elbows. I could sense rather than see the bo’sun by the window, ready
to pay out the rope round my waist.
“Archie,” I said softly, “give me that spiel again. The one about
how everything is going to turn out all right.”
“You’ll be here again before we know you’re gone,” he said
cheerfully. “See and bring my knife back.”
I felt for the rope attached to the bed, got it in both hands,
eased my elbows off the sill, and dropped quickly, hand over hand, as
macdonald played out my life line. Five seconds later I was in the
water.
the water was dark and cold and it took my breath away. After the
warmth of the sick bay the shock of the almost immediate transition, the
abrupt drop in temperature, was literally paralysing. Momentarily,
involuntarily, I lost my grip on the rope, panicked when I realised what
had happened, floundered about desperately, and caught it again. The
bo’sun was doing a good job above: the sudden increase in weight as i’d
lost my life line must have had him halfway out of the window.
but the cold wasn’t the worst. If you can survive the initial
shock you can tolerate the cold to a limited degree, accustomed but not
reconciled; what you can’t tolerate, what you can’t become accustomed to
is the involuntary swallowing of large mouthfuls of salt water every few
seconds. And that was what was happening to me.
I had known that being towed alongside a ship doing twelve knots
wasn’t going to be any too pleasant, but I had never thought it was
going to be as bad as this. The factor I hadn’t taken into the
reckoning was the waves. One moment I was being towed, face down and
planing, up the side of a wave; the next, as the wave swept by under me,
I was almost completely out of the water, then falling forwards and down
wards to smash into the rising shoulder of the next wave with a jarring
violence that knocked all the breath from my body. And when all the
breath has been driven from you the body’s demands that you immediately
gulp in air are insistent, imperative, and not to be denied. But with
my face buried in the sea I wasn’t gulping in air, I was gulping down
large quantities of salt water. It was like having water under high
pressure forced down my throat by a hose. I was floundering,
porpoising, twisting and spinning exactly like a hooked fish being
pulled in on the surface through the wake of a fast-trolling motorboat.
Slowly, but very surely, I was drowning.
I was beaten before I started. I knew I had to get back, and at
once. I was gasping and choking on sea water; my nostrils were on fire
with it; my stomach was full of it; my throat burned with it, and I knew
that at least some of it had already reached my lungs.
a system of signals had been arranged, and now I began to tug
frantically on the rope round my waist, hanging on to the other rope
with my left hand. I tugged half a dozen times, slowly, in some sort of
order at first, then, as no response came, frantically, despairingly. I
was porpoising up and down so violently that all macdonald could be
feeling anyway was a constant and irregular series of alternate
tightenings and slackenings of the line; he had no means of
distinguishing between one type of tug and another.
I tried to pull myself back on my own line, but against the
onrushing pressure of the water as the campari ploughed through that
stormy sea it was quite impossible. When the tension came off the line