ALISTAIR MACLEAN
The Golden Rendezvous
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This eBook edition 2009
First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1962
Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1962
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021 Cover photograph © Stephen Mulcahey
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: 9780006162599
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007289448
Version: 2020-10-22
To A. A. Lamont
Contents
III: Tuesday 9.30 p.m.–10.15 p.m.
IV: Tuesday 10.15 p.m.–Wednesday 8.45 a.m.
V: Wednesday 8.45 a.m.–3.30 p.m.
VI: Wednesday 7.45 p.m.–8.15 p.m.
VII: Wednesday 8.30 p.m.–Thursday 10.30 a.m.
X: Friday 9 a.m.–Saturday 1 a.m.
My shirt was no longer a shirt but just a limp and sticky rag soaked with sweat. My feet ached from the fierce heat of the steel deck plates. My forehead, under the peaked white cap, ached from the ever-increasing constriction of the leather band that made scalping only a matter of time. My eyes ached from the steely glitter of reflected sunlight from metal, water and white-washed harbour buildings. And my throat ached, from pure thirst. I was acutely unhappy.
I was unhappy. The crew were unhappy. The passengers were unhappy. Captain Bullen was unhappy and this last made me doubly unhappy because when things went wrong with Captain Bullen he invariably took it out on his chief officer. I was his chief officer.
I was bending over the rail, listening to the creak of wire and wood and watching our after jumbo derrick take the strain as it lifted a particularly large crate from the quayside, when a hand touched my arm. Captain Bullen again, I thought drearily, and then I realised that whatever the captain’s caprices wearing Chanel No. 5 wasn’t one of them. This would be Miss Beresford.
And it was. In addition to the Chanel she was wearing a white silk dress and that quizzical half-amused smile that made most of the other officers turn mental cartwheels and handsprings but served only to irritate me. I have my weaknesses, but tall, cool, sophisticated and worldly young women with a slightly malicious sense of humour is not one of them.
“Good afternoon, Mr. First Officer,” she said sweetly. She had a soft musical voice with hardly a hint of superiority or condescension when talking to the lower orders like myself, “We’ve been wondering where you were. You are not usually an absentee at apéritif time.”
“I know, Miss Beresford. I’m sorry.” What she said was true enough: what she didn’t know was that I turned up for apéritifs with the passengers more or less at the point of a gun. Standing company orders stated that it was as much a part of the ship’s officers’ duties to entertain the passengers as to sail the ship, and as Captain Bullen loathed all passengers with a fierce and total loathing, he saw to it that most of the entertaining fell to me. I nodded at the big crate now hovering over the hatchway of number five hold, then at the piled-up crates on the quayside. “I’m afraid I have work to do. Four or five hours