The Dark Crusader
ALISTAIR MACLEAN
HarperCollins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1961
Copyright © Devoran Trustees Ltd 1961
Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780006165439
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007289257
Version: 2018-04-17
To Douglas and Violet
Contents
III Tuesday 7 p.m.–Wednesday 9 a.m.
V Wednesday 10 p.m.–Thursday 5 a.m.
VI Thursday noon–Friday 1.30 a.m.
VII Friday 1.30 a.m.–3.30 a.m.
A small dusty man in a small dusty room. That’s how I always thought of him, just a small dusty man in a small dusty room.
No cleaning woman was ever allowed to enter that office with its soot-stained heavily curtained windows overlooking Birdcage Walk: and no person, cleaner or not, was ever allowed inside unless Colonel Raine himself were there.
And no one could ever have accused the colonel of being allergic to dust.
It lay everywhere. It lay on the oak-stained polished floor surrounds that flanked the threadbare carpet. It filmed the tops of bookcases, filing cabinets, radiators, chair-arms and telephones: it lay smeared streakily across the top of the scuffed knee-hole desk, the dust-free patches marking where the papers or books had recently been pushed to one side: motes danced busily in a sunbeam that slanted through an uncurtained crack in the middle of a window: and, trick of the light or not, it needed no imagination at all to see a patina of dust on the thin brushed-back grey hair of the man behind the desk, to see it embedded in deeply trenched lines on the grey sunken cheeks, the high receding forehead.
And then you saw the eyes below the heavy wrinkled lids and you forgot all about the dust: eyes with the hard jewelled glitter of a peridot stone, eyes of the clear washed-out aquamarine of a Greenland glacier, but not so warm.
He rose to greet me as I crossed the room, offered me a cold hard bony hand like a gardening tool, waved me to a chair directly opposite the light-coloured veneered panel so incongruously let into the front of his mahogany desk, and seated himself, sitting very straight, hands clasped lightly on the dusty desk before him.
‘Welcome home, Bentall.’ The voice matched the eyes, you could almost hear the far-off crackling of dried ice. ‘You made fast time. Pleasant trip?’
‘No, sir. Some Midlands textile tycoon put off the plane to make room for me at Ankara wasn’t happy. I’m to hear from his lawyers and as a sideline he’s going to drive the B.E.A. off the European airways. Other passengers sent me to Coventry, the stewardesses ignored me completely and it was as bumpy as hell. Apart from that, it was a fine trip.’
‘Such things