‘Six minutes yet, boss.’ Henry, seated at the radio table, must have been five feet away from Fleck, yet his voice was hardly less distinct: the ventilator’s amplifying effects were as good as that.
‘Doesn’t matter. Tune in.’
I strained my ear against that ventilator until it seemed to me that I was about halfway up it, but I heard nothing further. After a couple of minutes I felt a tug at my sleeve.
‘All done,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Here’s the torch.’
‘Right.’ I jumped down, helped her up and murmured: ‘For heaven’s sake don’t move from there. Our friend Henry’s listening in for the final word right now.’
I had little enough left to do and three or four minutes saw me all through. I stuffed a blanket inside the polythene bag and tied the neck securely: that made me the complete optimist. There was an awful lot of ‘ifs’ attached to that blanket. If we managed to break open the hatch, if we managed to get off the schooner without too many bullet holes in us, if we didn’t subsequently drown, if we weren’t eaten alive by sharks or barracuda or whatever else took a fancy to us during the hours of darkness, then it seemed like a good idea to have a water-soaked blanket to ward off sunstroke the following day. But I didn’t want to have to cope with its water-logged deadweight during the night: hence the polythene bag. I tied the bag on to one of the drums and had just finished stowing some clothes and cigarettes inside the same drum when Marie came aft and stood beside me.
She said without preamble and in a quiet still voice, not scared: ‘They don’t need us any more.’
‘Well, at least my preparations haven’t been wasted. They discussed it?’
‘Yes. They might have been discussing the weather. I think you’re wrong about Fleck, he’s not worried about doing away with anyone. From the way he talked it was just an interesting problem. Henry asked him how they were going to get rid of us and Fleck said: “Let’s do it nice and quiet and civilized. We’ll tell them that the boss has changed his mind. We’ll tell them they’re to be delivered to him as soon as possible. We’ll forget and forgive, we’ll take them up to the cabin for a drink, slip them the knock-out drops then ease them soft and gently over the side.”’
‘A charming fellow. We drown peacefully and even if we do wash up somewhere there’ll be no bullet holes to start people asking questions.’
‘But a post-mortem can always show the presence of poison or narcotics –’
‘Any post-mortem carried out on us,’ I interrupted heavily, ‘could be made without the doctor taking his hands from his pockets. If there are no broken bones you can’t determine anything about the cause of death from a couple of nice clean shiny skeletons which would be all that was left after the denizens of the deep had finished with us. Or maybe the sharks eat bones, too: I wouldn’t know.’
‘Do you have to talk like that?’ she asked coldly.
‘I’m only trying to cheer myself up.’ I handed her a couple of lifebelts. ‘Adjust the shoulder straps so that you can wear them both round your waist, one above the other. Be careful that you don’t strike the CO2 release accidentally. Wait till you are in the water before you inflate.’ I was already shrugging into my own harness. She appeared to be taking her time about adjusting the straps so I said: ‘Please hurry.’
‘There is no hurry,’ she said. ‘Henry said, “I suppose we’ll have to wait a couple of hours before we do anything,’ and Fleck said, “Yes, that at least.”Maybe they’re going to wait until it gets really dark.’
‘Or maybe they don’t want the crew to see anything. The reasons don’t matter. What does matter is that the two-hour delay refers to the time when they intend ditching us. They could come for us any time. And you’re overlooking the fact that when they do discover we’re missing the first thing they’ll do is back-track and search. I don’t much fancy being run down by a schooner or chopped to pieces by a propeller blade or just used for a little target practice. The sooner we’re gone the less chance we have of being picked up when they do discover we’re missing.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ she admitted.
It’s like the colonel told you.’ I said. ‘Bentall thinks of everything.’
She didn’t think that worth any comment so we finished fixing the lifebelts in silence. I gave her the torch and asked her to hold it in position while I climbed up the ladder with the bottle-screw and two hardwood battens and set about opening the hatch. I placed one of the hardwood battens on the top rung, set one end of the bottle-screw on the wood directly above the rung and unscrewed the upper eyebolt until it was firmly against the other batten which I’d placed under the hatch, to spread the load. I could hear the rain drumming furiously on the hatch and shivered involuntarily at the prospect of the imminent soaking, which was pretty silly when I came to consider just how much wetter I would be a few seconds later.
Forcing the hatch-cover was easy. Either the wood of the cover was old and dry or the screws holding the bolt in position were rusted for I’d only given the central shank of the bottle-screw half a dozen turns, the counter-threaded eye-bolts steadily forcing themselves farther apart, when I heard the first creak of the wood beginning to give way and splinter. Another half-dozen turns and suddenly all resistance to my turning hand ceased. The bolt had come clear of its moorings and the way out was clear – if, that was to say, Fleck and his friends weren’t standing there patiently waiting to blow my head off as soon as it appeared above the level of the hatch. There was only one way to find out, it didn’t appeal much but at least it was logical. I would stick my head out and see what happened to it.
I handed down the battens and the bottle-screw, checked that the two water drums were conveniently to hand, softly told Marie to switch off the torch, eased the hatch-cover open a few inches and cautiously felt for the bolt. It was just where it ought to have been, lying loose on top of the hatch-cover. I lowered it gently to the deck, bent my back as I took another two steps up the ladder, hooked my fingers over the edge of the hatch-cover and straightened both back and arm in one movement so that the hinged cover swung vertically open and my head was suddenly two feet above deck level. A jack-in-the-box couldn’t have done any better. Nobody shot me.
Nobody shot me because there was nobody there to shoot me, and there was nobody there to shoot me because no one but a very special type of moron would have ventured out on that deck without an absolutely compelling reason. Even then he would have required a suit of armour. If you were willing to stand at the bottom of Niagara Falls and to say to yourself that it was only raining, then you could have said it was raining that night. If anyone ever gets around to inventing a machine-gun that fires water instead of bullets I’ll know exactly what it will be like at the receiving end. Enormous cold drops of water, so close together as to be almost a solid wall, lashed the schooner with a ferocity and intensity I would not have believed possible. The decks were a welter of white seething foam as those cannonball giant drops disintegrated on impact and rebounded high into the air, while the sheer physical weight, the pitiless savagery of that torrential rain drumming on your bent back was nothing short of terrifying. Within five seconds I was literally soaked to the skin. I had to fight the almost overwhelming impulse to pull that cover over my head and retreat to the haven of that suddenly warm and dry and infinitely desirable hold. But then I thought of Fleck and his knock-out drops and of a couple of nice new shiny skeletons on the floor of the sea, and I had the hatch-cover fully back and was on deck, calling softly for the water-drums, before I was properly aware of what I was doing.
Fifteen seconds later Marie and the two drums were on deck and I was lowering the hatch-cover back into position and placing the bolt in approximately the original position in case someone did venture out later on a tour of inspection.
With the darkness and the blinding rain visibility didn’t exceed a few feet and we felt rather than saw our way to the stern of the schooner. I leaned far over the rail on the port counter to try to establish