“Mr. Carter,” Bullen said slowly. He’d stopped glaring at me. “I think perhaps you owe us a little explanation. This business of Dr. Caroline, the coffins, the—the substitutions——”
So I gave it to him, highly condensed, while everybody crowded round, and at the end he said: “And I think maybe I might owe you a small apology.” Contrite, but not going overboard about it. “But I can’t get the thought of the Twister out of my head—the Twister and the Campari. She was a good ship, Mister. Damn it, I know Carreras is a villain, a monster, a man surrounded by cutthroats. But did you have to do it this way? To condemn them all to death? Forty lives on your hands?”
“Better than a hundred and fifty lives on Carreras’s hands,” Julius Beresford said sombrely. “Which is what it would have been but for our friend here.”
“Couldn’t be done, sir,” I said to Bullen. “The Twister was armed and locked in position. Carreras has the key. The only way to render the bomb safe would be to tell Carreras and let him unlock it. If we’d told him before he’d left here, sure, he’d have disarmed it: then he would have killed every man and woman on the Ticonderoga. You can bet what you like that the generalissimo’s last instruction was: ‘no one must live to talk about this.’”
“It’s still not too late,” Bullen said insistently. He wasn’t giving a damn about Carreras, but he loved the Campari. “Once we’re under way there’s no chance of his being able to board us again and kill us, even assuming he comes after us. We can dodge whatever shells——”
“One moment, sir,” I interrupted. “How do we warn him?”
“By radio, man, by radio! There’s still six minutes. Get a message——”
“The Ticonderoga’s transmitters are useless,” I said wearily. “They’re smashed beyond repair.”
“What!” Brace caught my arm. “What? Smashed? How do you know?”
“Use your head,” I said irritably. “Those two bogus wireless operators were under orders to wreck the transmitters before they left. Do you think Carreras wanted you sending out SOSs all over the Atlantic the moment he took off?”
“The thought hadn’t even occurred to me.” Brace shook his head and spoke to a young officer. “On the phone. You heard. Check.”
He checked, and was back in thirty seconds, his face grave. “He’s right, sir. Completely smashed.”
“Our friend Carreras,” I murmured. “His own executioner.”
Two seconds later and five minutes ahead of schedule, the Campari blew itself out of existence. She must have been at least thirteen miles away, she was well hull-down over the horizon and the high square bulk of the Ticonderoga’s raised poop lay in our direct line of sight, but, for all that, the searing blue-white glare that was the heart of the exploding bomb struck our cringing wounded eyes with all the strength of a dozen noon-day suns while it momentarily high-lit the Ticonderoga in blinding white and shadows blacker than night as if some giant searchlight had been switched on only yards away. The intense whiteness, the murderous dazzlement, lasted no more than a fraction of a second—although its imprint on the eye’s retina lasted many times longer—and was replaced by a single bar-straight column of glowing red fire that streaked up into the dawn until it pierced the cloud above: and, following that, a great column of boiling seething-white water surged up slowly from the surface of the sea, incredibly slowly, seemed to reach half-way up to the clouds, then as slowly began to fall again. What little was left of the shattered and vaporised Campari would have been in that gigantic waterspout. The Campari and Carreras.
From birth to death that waterspout must have taken a full minute and it was only seconds after it had vanished and the eastern horizon became clear again that the single flat thunderclap of sound followed by the deep menacing rumble of the after-explosion and accompanying shock-waves came to us over the surface of the sea. Then again all was silence, profound and deathly.
“Well, Dr. Caroline,” I said conversationally, “at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that the damn’ thing works.”
He didn’t take me up on my conversational gambit. No one took me up on it. They were all waiting for the tidal wave, but no tidal wave came. After a minute or two a long low, very fast-moving swell bore down on us from the east, passed under the Ticonderoga, made her pitch heavily perhaps half a dozen times and then was gone. It was Captain Brace who was the first of them all to find his voice.
“That’s it, then Captain Bullen. All gone up in smoke. Your ship and my 150 million dollars in gold.”
“Just the ship, Captain Brace,” I said. “Just the ship. As for the twenty vaporised generators. I’m sure the United States Government will gladly recompense the Harmsworth and Holden Electrical Engineering Company.”
He smiled faintly, heaven knows he couldn’t have felt like smiling.
“There were no generators in those crates, Mr. Carter. Gold bullion for Fort Knox. How that devil Carreras——”
“You knew there was gold in those crates?” I asked.
“Of course I did. Rather I knew we had it on board. But there had been a mistake in marking the crates. So much damned secrecy, I suppose, that one hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing. According to my manifest, the crates of gold were the for’ard twenty on the upper deck, but an Admiralty message last night informed me of the mistake that had been made. Rather, it informed those damned renegades of radio operators. Never showed it to me, of course. They must have radioed the news to Carreras and the first thing they did when he tied up alongside was to give him the written message itself as confirmation. He gave it to me as a souvenir,” he added bitterly. He held out his hand with the form in it. “Want to see it?”
“No need.” I shook my head. “I can tell you word for word what’s in that cable, ‘HIGHEST PRIORITY URGENT IMMEDIATE REPEAT IMMEDIATE ATTENTION MASTER FORT TICONDEROGA: GRAVE ERROR IN LOADING MANIFEST: SPECIAL CARGO NOT REPEAT NOT IN FOR’ARD TWENTY CRATES FOR’ARD DECK MARKED TURBINES NASHVILLE TENNESSEE BUT REPEAT BUT IN FOR’ARD TWENTY CRATES AFTER DECK MARKED GENERATORS OAK RIDGE TENNESSEE: INDICATIONS YOU MAY BE RUNNING INTO HURRICANE ESSENTIAL SECURE AFTER DECK CARGO EARLIEST: FROM THE OFFICE OF THE MINISTER OF TRANSPORT BY THE HAND OF VICE-ADMIRAL RICHARD HODSON DIRECTOR NAVAL OPERATIONS.’”
Captain Brace stared at me.
“How in the name of——”
“Miguel Carreras also had a manifest in his cabin,” I said. “Marked—and correctly—exactly the same as yours. I saw it. That radio message never came from London. It came from me. I sent it from the wireless office of the Campari at two o’clock this morning.”
It was a long long silence indeed that followed: predictably enough, it was Susan Beresford who finally broke it. She moved across to Bullen’s stretcher, looked down at him and said: “Captain Bullen, I think you and I both owe Mr. Carter a very great apology.”
“I think we do, Miss Beresford, I think we do indeed.” He tried to scowl, but it didn’t quite come off. “But he told me to shut up, mind you. Me. His captain. You heard him?”
“That’s nothing,” she said in dismissal. “You’re only his captain. He told me to shut up, too, and I’m his fiancée. We’re getting married next month.”
“His fiancée? Getting—getting married next month?” In spite of the pain Captain Bullen propped himself up on one elbow, stared uncomprehendingly at each of us in turn, then lay back heavily on his stretcher. “Well, I’ll be damned! This is the first I’ve heard of this.”
“It’s the first Mr. Carter has heard of it too,” she admitted. “But he’s hearing it now.”
THE END
ALISTAIR MACLEAN
Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree
at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D. Litt from the same university.
He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide best- sellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
By Alistair MacLean
HMS Ulysses
The Guns of Navarone
South by Java Head
The Last Frontier
Night Without End
Fear is the Key
The Dark Crusader
The Satan Bug
The Golden Rendezvous
Ice Station Zebra
When Eight Bells Toll
Where Eagles Dare
Force 10 from Navarone
Puppet on a Chain
Caravan to Vaccarès
Bear Island
The Way to Dusty Death
Breakheart Pass
Circus
The Golden Gate
Seawitch
Goodbye California
Athabasca
River of Death
Partisans
Floodgate
San Andreas
The Lonely Sea (stories)
Santorini
Copyright
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.
Harper
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1
First published in Great Britain by
William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1962 then in paperback by Fontana 1964
Copyright © Devoran Trustees Ltd 1962
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.
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EPub Edition © JANUARY 2008 ISBN: 9780007289448
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Alistair MacLean, The Golden Rendezvous
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