take-over. Where would he have hidden it where a steward wouldn’t
stumble across it?
that ruled out all the furniture fittings, all the places i’d
wasted time in searching. It also ruled out bed, blankets, mattresses
but not the carpet! the ideal hiding place for a sheet of paper.
I almost threw myself at the carpet rn his sleeping cabin. The
carpets in the campari’s accommodation were secured by press-button
studs for ease of quick removal. I caught the corner of the carpet by
the door, ripped free a dozen studs, and there it was right away, six
inches in from the edge. A large sheet of canvas paper, folded in four,
with “t.e.s. Fort ticonderoga. Most secret” printed in one corner.
Five minutes to go.
I stared at the paper until I had memorised its exact position
relative to the carpet, picked it up, and smoothed it out. Diagrams of
the ticonderoga with complete stowage plans of the cargo. But all I was
interested in was the deck cargo. The plan showed crates stacked on
both fore and aft decks, and twenty of those on the foredeck were marked
with a heavy red cross. Red for gold.
in a small careful hand carreras had written on the side: “all deck
cargo crates identical in size. Gold in waterproof, with welded steel
boxes to float free in event of damage or sinking. Each crate equipped
with yellow water stain.” I supposed this was some chemical which, when
it came into contact with salt water, would stain the sea for a wide
area around. I read on: “gold crates indistinguishable from general
cargo. All crates stamped ‘harms worth & holden electrical engineering
company.’ stated contents generators and turbines. Forward-deck cargo
consigned to nashville, tennessee, exclusively turbines; afterdeck cargo
consigued to oak ridge, tennessee, exclusively generators. So marked.
Forward twenty crates on forward deck gold.”
I didn’t hurry. Time was desperately short, but I didn’t hurry. I
studied the plan, which corresponded exactly to carreras’ observations,
and I studied the observations themselves until I knew I would never
forget a word of them. I folded and replaced the plan exactly as I had
found it, pressed the carpet snap studs back into place, went swiftly
through the cabins on a last check to ensure that I had left no trace of
my passing: there were none that I could see. I locked the door and
left.
the cold, driving rain was falling more heavily than ever now,
slanting in across the port side, drumming metallically against the
bulkheads, rebounding ankle-high off the polished wooden decks. On the
likely enough theory that carreras’ patrolling men would keep to the
sheltered starboard side of the accommodation, I kept to the opposite
side as I hurried aft: in my stockinged soles and wearing that black
suit and mask no one could have heard or seen me at a distance of more
than a few feet. No one heard or saw me; I heard or saw no one. I made
no attempt to look, listen, or exercise any caution at all. I reached
number four hold within two minutes of leaving carreras’ cabin.
I needn’t have hurried. Carreras had made no attempt to replace
the tarpaulin he’d had to pull back in order to remove the battens, and
I could see straight down into the bottom of the hold. Four men down
there, two holding powerful electric lanterns, carreras with a gun
hanging by his side, the lanky stooped form of dr. Slingsby caroline,
still wearing that ridiculous white wig askew on his head, bent over the
twister. I couldn’t see what he was doing.
it was like a nineteenth-century print of grave robbers at work.
The tomb like depths of the hold, the coffins, the lanterns, the feeling
of apprehension and hurry and absorbed concentration that lent an evilly
conspiratorial air as the elements were there. And especially the
element of tension, an electric tension you could almost feel pulsating
through the darkness of the night. But a tension that came not from the
fear of discovery but from the possibility that at any second something
might go finally and cataclysmically wrong. If it took ten minutes to
arm the twister, and obviously it took even longer than that, then it
must be a very tricky and complicated procedure altogether. Dr.
Caroline’s mind, it was a fair guess, would be in no fit state to cope
with tricky and complicated procedures: he’d be nervous, probably badly
scared; his hands would be unsteady; he was working, probably with
inadequate tools, on an unstable platform by the light of unsteady
torches, and even though he might not be desperate enough or fool enough
to jinx it deliberately, there seemed to me, as there obviously seemed
to the men down in the hold, that there was an excellent chance that his
hand would slip. Instinctively I moved back a couple of feet until the
opening of the hatch came between me and the scene below. I couldn’t
see the twister any more, that made me quite safe if it blew up.
I rose to my feet and made a couple of cautious circuits of e
hatch, the first close in, the second further out. But Carreras had no
prowlers there: apart from the guards on e gun, the afterdeck appeared
to be completely deserted. Returned to the port forward corner of the
hatch and settled own to wait.
I hoped I wouldn’t have to wait too long. The sea water ad been
cold; the heavy rain was cold; the wind was cold; was soaked to the skin
and was recurringly and increasingly object to violent bouts of
shivering, shivering I could do nothing to control. The fever ran
fiercely in my blood. Maybe e thought of dr. Caroline’s hand slipping
had something do with the shivering: whatever the reason, i’d be lucky
get off with no more than pneumonia.
another five minutes, and I took a second cautious peek own into
the hold. Still at it. I rose, stretched, and began to pace softly up
and down to ward off the stiffness and cramp that was settling down on
my body, especially on the legs. Things went the way I hoped I couldn’t
afford to have stiffness anywhere.
if things went the way I hoped. I peered down a third me into the
hold and this time stayed in that stooped position, unmoving. Dr.
Caroline had finished. Under the watchful eye and gun of the radio
operator, he was screwing the brass plaqued lid back on the coffin while
carreras and the other an had the lid already off the next coffin and
were bent over it, presumably fusing the conventional explosive inside;
probably it was intended as a stand-by in case of the malfunction of the
twister or, even more probably, in the event the failure of the
twister’s timing mechanism, it was designed to set it off by sympathetic
detonation. I didn’t know, I couldn’t guess. And for the moment I was
not in the slightest worried. The crucial moment had come. The crucial
moment for dr. Caroline. I knew as he was bound to know-that they
couldn’t afford to let him live. He’d done all they required of him.
He was of no further use to them. He could die any moment now. If they
chose to put a gun to his head and murder him where he stood, there was
nothing in the world I could do about it, nothing I would even try to do
about it. I would just have to stand there silently, without movement
or protest, and watch him die. For if I let dr. Caroline die without
making any move to save him, then only he would die; but if I tried to
save him and falled and with only a knife and marlinespike against two
submachine guns and pistols the chances of failure were 100 per
cent-then not only caroline but every member of the passengers and crew
of the campari would die also. The greatest good of the greatest
number… Would they shoot him where he stood or would they do it on
the upper deck?
logic said they would do it on the upper deck. Carreras would be
using the campari for a few days yet; he wouldn’t be wanting a dead man
lying in the hold, and there would be no point in shooting him down
there and then carrying him up above when he could make the climb under
his own steam and be disposed of on the upper deck. If I were carreras,
that is what I would have figured.
and that was how he did figure. Caroline tightened the last screw,
laid down the screw driver, and straightened. I caught a glimpse of his
face, white, strained, one eye twitching uncontrollably. The radio
operator said, “senor carreras?”
carreras straightened, turned, looked at him, then at caroline, and
nodded.
“Take him to his cabin, carlos. Report here afterwards.” I moved