Authors: Alistair MacLean
It would be ridiculous to deny that I was frightened, so I won't. I was scared, and badly scared. Two fit men against one semi-invalid, four good arms against one, two undoubtedly skilled and cunning knife-fighters against a man who'd never even carved up a lump of cooked dead meat far less a live human being. And this wasn't the time to learn. But it was the time to do something, and do it very quickly indeed before one or other of them caught on to the idea that at five yards I was a target that could hardly be missed and changed over from a stabbing to a throwing grip on his knife.
I rushed at them, right hand and knife over my shoulder as if I were wielding a club, and both of them fell back an involuntary couple of paces, maybe because of the foolhardy recklessness of it, more likely because of the respectful fear which Orientals habitually show in the presence of madness. I brought the knife whistling forward over my shoulder and with the tinkling of glass from the smashed overhead light and the flick of my left thumb on the torch switch the cave became as pitch-black as the tomb it really was.
It was essential to move, and move as fast as possible before they realised that I had the double advantage of having a torch and being in the position to lash out indiscriminately with my knife in the hundred per cent certainty that I would be stabbing an enemy, whereas they had a fifty per cent chance of stabbing a friend. Reckless of the noise I made in that utterly silent chamber, I pulled away the occluding plaster on the face of the torch, slipped off my sandals, ran three heavy steps in the direction of the entrance, stopped abruptly and sent both sandals sliding along the ground to thud softly against the- wooden door.
Had they been given another ten seconds to take stock of their position, to work out the possibilities, probably the last thing they would have done would have been to rush headlong to the source of the sudden noise. As it was, they had been given barely five seconds altogether in which to think, and the immediate and inevitable reaction must have been that I was trying to escape. I heard the quick patter of bare feet, the sound of a brief scuffle, a soft thud and an explosive gasp of agony that was lost in the clatter of something metallic falling to the floor.
Four swift soundless steps on my stockinged feet, a flick of the left thumb and they were pinned in the white glare of the torch, a tableau vivant but for their unnaturally petrified rigidity which gave them for all the world the appearance of a group sculpted from marble. They stood face to face, their chests almost but not quite touching. The man on my right had his left hand twisted in his companion's shirt front while his right hand was pressed against the other's body, just below waist level: the man on the left, his face averted from me, was arched over backwards like an overstrung bow, both hands locked over the right hand of his companion: the ridged and straining tendons turned the hands into waxen claws, the knuckles gleamed white like polished bone. I could see the blood-stained point of a knife sticking out two inches from the small of his back.
For two seconds, perhaps three-it seemed far longer than that-the man on the right stared unbelievingly into the face of the dying man, then the realisation of his lethal blunder and the awareness that death stood now at his own elbow broke the horror-numbed spell that had held him in thrall. He struggled frantically to withdraw his knife but the last agonies of his friend had locked right hand and knife fast in an iron-bound grip. He swung round desperately on me, his left arm flying upwards and outwards in a gesture that was half blow, half an attempt to shield himself from the beam I'd now directed into his shrinking eyes, and for a moment he had no guard left. The moment was enough and to spare. The blade of my knife was twelve inches long but for all that I jarred both wrist and knife as the hilt struck home against the breast-bone. He coughed once, a brief convulsive choked sound and drew his thin lips far back from the fast-clenched teeth in to a hideous and blood-flecked grin: then the blade of my knife snapped and I was left with only the hilt and an inch of steel in my hand as the two men, still locked together, swayed over to my right and crashed heavily on to the limestone floor of the cave.
I shone the torch beam down on the faces at my feet, but it was a superfluous precaution, they would never trouble me again. I recovered my sandals, picked up the fallen knife and left, closing the door behind me. Once outside I leaned my weight against the tunnel wall, hands hanging by my side, and drew in great deep lungfuls of pure fresh air. I felt weak, but put it down to my damaged arm and the foul air inside that tomb, the brief and violent episode on the other side of that door had left me curiously unaffected, or so I thought until I felt the pain in my cheek muscles and jaw and realised that my lips were strained back in involuntary imitation of the death's head grin of the man I had just killed. It took a conscious effort of will to relax the overstrained muscles of my face.
It was then that I heard the singing. This was it, Bentall’s tottering reason had gone at last, the shock of what I'd just seen and done had overstrained more than the facial muscles. Bentall unhinged, Bentall round the bend, Bentall hearing noises in his head. What would Colonel Raine have said if he knew his trusty servant had gone off his trolley? He would probably have smiled his little invisible smile and said in his dry dusty voice that to hear singing in an abandoned mine-working, even a mine under the control of murderous impostors and patrolled by equally murderous Chinese, was not necessarily evidence of insanity. To which his trusty servant would have replied, no, it wasn't, but to hear a choir of English women singing 'Greensleeves' most certainly was.
For that was what I was hearing. Women's voices and singing 'Greensleeves'. Not a recording, for one of the voices was slightly off-key and another trying to harmonise with what I could only regard as a very limited degree of success. English women, singing 'Greensleeves'. I shook my head violently but they still kept at it. I clasped my hands over my ears and the singing stopped. I took them away and the singing started again. Noises in the head don't stop when you put your hands over your ears. Maybe the fact that there were English women down in that mine was crazy, but at least I wasn't. Still like a man in a trance, but careful, for all that, to make not the slightest whisper of sound, I pushed myself off the door and went padding down the tunnel to investigate.
The sound of the singing swelled abruptly as I followed a ninety degree turning to the left. Twenty yards away I could see a faint backwash of light against the left side of the tunnel where it seemed to make another abrupt turning, this time to the right. I drifted up to this corner like a falling snowflake and poked my head around with all the dead slow caution of an old hedgehog taking his first wary squint at the world after a winter's hibernation.
Twenty feet away the full width of the tunnel was blocked by vertical iron bars, spaced about six inches apart, with an inset grille door. Ten feet beyond that were a similar set of bars, with a similar door. Halfway between the two doors, suspended close to the roof, a naked bulb threw a harsh light over the small table directly beneath it and the two overalled men who sat one on either side of the table. Between them were a pile of curiously shaped wooden blocks and I assumed that they were playing a game, but it wasn't any game I'd ever seen. But whatever it was, it was obviously a game that called for concentration to judge by the irritated looks both men gave in the direction of the darkened space that lay behind the second set of bars. The singing showed no sign of stopping. Why people should be singing after midnight struck me as inexplicable until I remembered that to people imprisoned in a darkened cave day and night must have no meaning. Why they should be singing at all I couldn't even begin to imagine.
After maybe twenty seconds more of this, one of the men thumped his fist on the table, jumped to his feet, picked up one of two carbines that I could now see had been propped against a chair, crossed to the faraway set of bars and rattled the butt of the gun against the metal, at the same time shouting out something in an angry voice. I didn't understand the words but it didn't need a linguist to understand the meaning. He was asking for silence. He didn't get it. After a pause lasting maybe three seconds the singing came again, louder and more off-key than ever. Give them time and they'd start in on 'There'll Always Be an England'. The man with the carbine shook his head in disgust and disbelief and came wearily back to the table. The situation was beyond him.
It was beyond me too. Maybe if I hadn't been so tired, or maybe if I'd been someone else altogether, someone, say, about twice as smart as I was, I might have thought of a way to get past or even overpower the guards. But right then all I could think of was that I had one little knife and they had two big guns and that anyway I'd used up all my luck for that night.
I left.
* * *
Marie was sleeping peacefully when I finally got back to our hut and I didn't wake her at once. Let her sleep as long as she could, she wouldn't get any more sleep this night, maybe her dark fears of the future were justified after all, maybe she wasn't going to have any more sleep, ever.
Mentally, physically, emotionally, I was exhausted. Completely exhausted, let down as I'd never been before. On the way out from the mine I'd come to the conclusion that there was one thing and one thing only to do: I'd screwed what little was left of my nerve up to the sticking point to do it and when the doing had proved impossible the reaction had been correspondingly great. What I had planned to do had been to kill both Witherspoon-I still thought of him as that-and Hewell. Not kill them, murder them, murder them as they lay in their beds. Or maybe it was better to say execute them. Obviously, from the tunnel that went clear through to the other side of the island and the armoury in the mine, a full-scale attack was about to be launched on the naval establishment on the other side of the island. With Witherspoon and Hewell dead, it seemed unlikely that the leaderless Chinese would go through with it, and to me, at that moment, the prevention of the attack was the only thing that mattered. It mattered even more than the welfare of the girl asleep beside me, and I could no longer kid myself that my feelings towards her were the same as they'd been three short days ago: but she still came second.
But I hadn't killed them in their beds for the sufficient reason that neither of them had been in their beds: they'd both been across at the professor's house, drinking the chilled canned beer that the Chinese boy brought in from time to time, talking in soft voices as they pored over charts. The general and his A.D.C. preparing for D-Day. And D-Day was at hand.
The disappointment, the bitterness of what had seemed the ultimate defeat, had taken the last of the heart from me. I'd withdrawn from the window of the professor's house and just stood there dully, unthinkingly, careless of the risk of discovery, until after maybe five minutes a few of my brain cells started trudging around again. Then I'd walked heavily back up to the mine-it says much for my state of mind that the thought of repeating my earlier hands and knees crawl up there never entered my head-picked up some R.D.X. fuses and chemical igniters in the armoury, came out again, rummaged around the generating plant until I found a can of petrol and then returned.
Now I got pencil and paper, hooded the torch light and started writing a message in block capitals. It took me only three minutes and when I was finished I was far from satisfied with it, but it would have to do. I crossed the room and shook Marie by the shoulder.
She woke slowly, reluctantly, murmuring something in a drowsy voice, then sat up abruptly in bed. I could see the pale gleam of her shoulders in the dark, the movement as a hand came up to brush tousled hair away from her eyes.
"Johnny?" she whispered. "What is it? What-what did you find?"
"Too damn much. Just let me talk. We have very little time left. Know anything about radio?"
"Radio?" A brief pause. "I did the usual course. I can send Morse, not fast, but-"
"Morse I can manage myself. Do you know what frequency ships' radio operators use for sending distress messages?"
"S.O.S.'s, you mean? I'm not sure. Low frequency, isn't it? Or long wave?"
"Same thing. You can't remember the wave-band?"
She thought for a few moments and I sensed rather than saw the shake of the head in the darkness. "I'm sorry, Johnny."
"It doesn't matter." It did matter, it mattered a very great deal, but I'd been crazy even to hope. "But you'll know old Raine's private code, though?"
"Of course."
"Well, code this message, will you?" I thrust the paper, pencil and torch into her hands. "As quickly as you can."
She didn't ask me the purpose of what must have struck her as an idiotic request: she just hooded the torch under the blanket and read the message in a low voice.
RIDEX COMBON LONDON STOP IMPRISONED VARDU ISLAND APPROX 150 MILES SOUTH VTTI LEVU STOP DISCOVERED MURDERED BODIES DR CHARLES FAIRFIELD ARCHAEOLOGISTS PROFESSOR WITHERSPOON DR CARSTAIRS SIX OTHERS STOP BILEX WIVES MISSING SCIENTISTS HELD PRISONER HERE STOP MEN RESPONSIBLE PLANNING ALLOUT ASSAULT DAWN NAVAL INSTALLATION WEST SIDE VARDU STOP SITUATION GRAVE STOP IMPERATIVE AIRBORNE ASSISTANCE IMMEDIATELY BENTALL
The faint glow of the light died as the torch was switched off. For almost twenty seconds there was nothing to be heard but the far-off murmur of the surf on the reef, and when she finally spoke her voice was unsteady.
"You found all this out tonight, Johnny?"
"Yes. They've driven a tunnel clear through to the other side of the island. They've a well-stocked armoury hidden away in one of the caves, where they keep their blasting explosive. And I heard women's voices. Singing."
"Singing!"
"I know it sounds crazy. It must be the scientists' wives, who else could it be. Get busy on that code. I have to go out again."
"The code-how are you going to send this message?" she asked helplessly.