The Golden Rendezvous. Alistair MacLean

      “You’re hopeless,” she laughed. I was too tiny a pebble to cause even a ripple in her smiling pool of self-complacency. “And no lunch, you poor man. I thought you were looking pretty glum as I came along.” She glanced at the winch-driver then at the seamen manhandling the suspended crate into position on the floor of the hold. “Your men don’t seem too pleased at the prospect either. They are a morose-looking lot.”

      I eyed them briefly. They were a morose-looking lot.

      “Oh, they’ll be spelled for food all right. It’s just that they have their own private worries. It must be about a hundred and ten down in that hold there, and it’s an almost unwritten law that white crews should not work in the afternoons in the tropics. Besides, they’re all still brooding darkly over the losses they’ve suffered. Don’t forget that it’s less than seventy-two hours since they had that brush with the Customs down in Jamaica.”

      “Brush,” I thought was good: in what might very accurately be described as one fell swoop the Customs had confiscated from about forty crew members no fewer than 25,000 cigarettes and over two hundred bottles of hard liquor that should have been placed on the ship’s bond before arrival in Jamaican waters. That the liquor had not been placed in bond was understandable enough as the crew were expressly forbidden to have any in their quarters in the first place: that not even the cigarettes had been placed in bond had been due to the crew’s intention of following their customary practice of smuggling both liquor and tobacco ashore and disposing of them at a handsome profit to Jamaicans more than willing to pay a high price for the luxury of duty-free Kentucky bourbon and American cigarettes. But then, the crew had not been told that, for the first time in its five years’ service on the West Indian run, the s.s. Campari was to be searched from stem to stern with a thorough ruthlessness that spared nothing that came in its path, a high and searching wind that swept the ship clean as a whistle. It had been a black day.

      And so was this. Even as Miss Beresford was patting me consolingly on the arm and murmuring a few farewell words of sympathy which didn’t go any too well with the twinkle in her eyes, I caught sight of Captain Bullen perched on top of the companionway leading down from the main deck. “Glowering” would probably be the most apt term to describe the expression on his face. As he came down the companionway and passed Miss Beresford he made a heroic effort to twist his features into the semblance of a smile and managed to hold it for all of two seconds until he had passed her by, then got back to his glowering again. For a man who is dressed in gleaming whites from top to toe to give the impression of a black approaching thundercloud is no small feat, but Captain Bullen managed it without any trouble. He was a big man, six feet two and very heavily built, with sandy hair and eyebrows, a smooth red face that no amount of sun could ever tan and a clear blue eye that no amount of whisky could ever dim. He looked at the quayside, the hold and then at me, all with the same impartial disfavour.

      “Well, Mister,” he said heavily. “How’s it going? Miss Beresford giving you a hand, eh?” When he was in a bad mood, it was invariably “Mister”: in a neutral mood, it was “First”: and when in a good temper—which, to be fair, was most of the time—it was always “Johnny-me-boy.” But today it was “Mister.” I took my guard accordingly and ignored the implied reproof of time-wasting. He would be gruffly apologetic the next day. He always was.

      “Not too bad, sir. Bit slow on the dock-side.” I nodded to where a group of men were struggling to attach chain slings to a crate that must have been at least eighteen feet in length by six square. “I don’t think the Carracio stevedores are accustomed to handling such heavy lifts.”

      He took a good look.

      “They couldn’t handle a damned wheel-barrow,” he snapped eventually. “Can you manage it by six, Mister?” Six o’clock was an hour past the top of the tide and we had to clear the harbour entrance sandbar by then or wait another ten hours.

      “I think so, sir,” and then, to take his mind off his troubles and also because I was curious, asked: “What are in those crates? Motor-cars?”

      “Motor-cars? Are you mad?” His cold blue eyes swept over the white-washed jumble of the little town and the dark green of the steeply-rising forested hills behind. “This lot couldn’t build a rabbit-hutch for export, far less a motorcar. Machinery. So the Bills of Lading say. Dynamos, generators, refrigerating, air-conditioning and refining machinery. For New York.”

      “Do you mean to tell me,” I said carefully, “that the generalissimo, having successfully completed the confiscation of all the American sugar-refining mills, is now dismantling them and selling the machinery back to the Americans? Bare-faced theft like that?”

      “Petty larceny on the part of the individual is theft,” Captain Bullen said morosely. “When governments engage in grand larceny, it’s economics.”

      “The generalissimo and his government must be pretty desperate for money?”

      “What do you think?” Bullen growled. “No one knows how many were killed in the capital and a dozen other towns in Tuesday’s hunger riots. Jamaican authorities reckon the number in hundreds. Since they turfed out most foreigners and closed down or confiscated nearly all foreign businesses they haven’t been able to earn a penny abroad. The coffers of the revolution are as empty as a drum. Man’s completely desperate for money.”

      He turned away and stood staring out over the harbour, big hands wide-spaced on the guard-rail, his back ramrod-stiff. I recognised the sign, after three years of sailing with him it would have been impossible not to. There was something he wanted to say, there was some steam he wanted to blow off and no better outlet than that tried and trusty relief valve, Chief Officer Carter. Only whenever he wished to blow off steam it was a matter of personal pride with him never to bring the matter up himself. It was no great trick to guess what was troubling him, so I obliged.

      I said, conversationally: “The cables we sent to London, sir. Any reply to them yet?”

      “Just ten minutes ago.” He turned round casually as if the matter had already slipped his memory, but the slight purpling tinge in the red face betrayed him, and there was nothing casual about his voice when he went on: “Slapped me down, Mister, that’s what they did. Slapped me down. My own company. And the Ministry of Transport. Both of them. Told me to forget about it, said my protests were completely out of order, warned me of the consequences of future lack of co-operation with the appropriate authorities, whatever the hell appropriate authorities might be. Me! My own company! Thirty-five years I’ve sailed with the Blue Mail Line and now—and now …” His fists clenched and his voice choked into fuming silence.

      “So there was someone bringing very heavy pressure to bear after all,” I murmured.

      “There was, Mister, there was.” The cold blue eyes were very cold indeed and the big hands opened wide then closed, tight, till the ivory showed. Bullen was a captain, but he was more than that: he was the commodore of the Blue Mail fleet and even the board of directors walk softly when the fleet commodore is around: at least, they don’t treat him like an office boy. He went on softly: “If ever I get my hands on Dr. Slingsby Caroline I’ll break his bloody neck.”

      Captain Bullen would have loved to get his hands on the oddly named Dr. Slingsby Caroline. Tens of thousands of police, government agents and American servicemen engaged in the hunt for him would also have loved to get their hands on him. So would millions of ordinary citizens if for no other reason than the excellent one that there was a reward of 50,000 dollars for information leading to his capture. But the interest of Captain Bullen and the crew of the Campari was even more personal: the missing man was very much the root of all our troubles.

      Dr. Slingsby Caroline had vanished, appropriately enough, in South Carolina. He had worked at a U.S. Government’s very hush-hush Weapons Research Establishment south of the town of Columbia, an establishment concerned with the evolving, as had only become known in the past week or so, of some sort of small fission weapon for use by either fighter-planes or mobile rocket-launchers in local tactical nuclear wars. As nuclear weapons went, it was the veriest bagatelle compared to the five megaton monsters