The Dark Crusader. Alistair MacLean

of survival. ‘The way the sea-bed is sloping up it can be nothing else. Now’s our chance to see those dazzling sands and waving palms and the brown-skinned beauties we’ve heard so much about. Give me your hand.’

      There was no answering levity or even gladness from her, she just took my hand in silence as I transferred the blanket to my other hand and started feeling my cautious way up the rapidly shelving sea-floor. In less than a minute we were standing on rock, and on any other night we would have been high and dry. In that rain, we were high and wet. But we were high. Nothing else mattered.

      We lifted both water drums on to the shore and I draped the blanket over Marie’s head: the rain had slackened, but slackening on that night was a comparative thing only, it was still fierce enough to be hurtful. I said: ‘I’m just going to take a brief look round. Back in five minutes.’

      ‘All right,’ she said dully. It didn’t seem to matter whether I came or went.

      I was back in two minutes, not five. I’d taken eight steps and fallen into the sea on the other side and it didn’t take me long to discover that our tiny island was only four times as long as it was broad and consisted of nothing but rock. I would have liked to see Robinson Crusoe making out on that little lot. Marie hadn’t moved from where I had left her.

      It’s just a little rock in the middle of the sea,’ I reported. ‘But at least we’re safe. For the present, anyway.’

      ‘Yes.’ She rubbed the rock with the toe of her sandal. It’s coral, isn’t it?’

      ‘I suppose so.’ As with many others, the sun-drenched coral islands of the Pacific had formed a staple part of my earlier reading diet but when I incautiously sat down to take the weight off my feet and stock of the situation my youthful enthusiasms vanished pretty rapidly. If this was coral it felt like the sort of thing an Indian Fakir might graduate to after he’d mastered the easier stuff, like sleeping on a bed of red-hot nails. The rock was hard, broken, jagged and with frequent spiny razor-sharp edges. I pushed myself quickly to my feet, careful not to cut my hands on the coral, picked up the two drums and set them down on the highest part of the reef. I went back for Marie, took her arm and we sat down side by side on the drums with our backs to the wind and the rain. She offered me part of the blanket as protection, and I wasn’t too proud to take it. It at least gave me the illusion of shelter.

      I talked to her for some time, but she only had monosyllables to offer in return. Then I dug a couple of cigarettes out from the packet I’d stowed in my water drum and offered her one, which she took, but that wasn’t very successful either for the blanket leaked like a sieve and inside a minute both cigarettes were completely sodden. After ten minutes or so I said: ‘What’s the matter, Marie? I agree that this is not the Grand Pacific Hotel, but at least we’re alive.’

      ‘Yes.’ A pause, then matter-of-factly: ‘I thought I was going to die out there tonight. I expected to die. I was so sure I would that this – well, it’s a sort of anticlimax. It’s not real. Not yet. You understand?’

      ‘No. What made you sure you were going to – ?’ I broke off for a moment. ‘Don’t tell me that you’re still thinking along the same daft lines as you were last night?’

      She nodded in the darkness. I felt the movement of the blanket rather than saw that of her head.

      ‘I’m sorry, I really am. I can’t help it. Maybe I’m not well, it’s never been like this before,’ she said helplessly. ‘You look into the future but almost all the time there isn’t any but if you do catch glimpses of it you’re not there yourself. It’s a kind of curtain drawn between you and tomorrow, and because you can’t see past it you feel that there is none. No tomorrow, I mean.’

      ‘Superstitious rubbish,’ I said shortly. ‘Just because you’re tired and out of sorts and soaked and shivering, you start having recourse to those morbid fancies. You’re no help to me, just no help at all. Half the time I think Colonel Raine was right and that you would make a first-class partner in this god-forsaken racket of ours: and half the time I’m convinced that you’re going to be a deadweight round my neck and drag me under.’ It was cruel, but I meant to be kind. ‘God knows how you managed to survive this business until now.’

      ‘I told you it’s new, something completely new for me. It is superstitious nonsense and I’ll not mention it again.’ She reached out and touched my hand. ‘It’s so terribly unfair to you. I’m sorry.’

      I didn’t feel proud of myself at all. I let the subject go and returned to the consideration of the South Pacific. I was coming to the conclusion that I didn’t much care for the South Pacific. The rain was the worst I’d ever known: coral was nasty sharp dangerous stuff: it was inhabited by a bunch of homicidally-minded characters: and, another shattered illusion, the nights could be very cold indeed. I felt clammy and chilled under the clinging wetness of that blanket and both of us were shaken by uncontrollable bouts of shivering which grew more frequent as the night wore on. At one stage it seemed to me that the sensible and logical thing for us to do would be to lie down in the very much warmer sea water and spend the night like that but when I went, briefly, to test this theory, I changed my mind. The water was warm enough, what changed my mind was a tentacle that appeared from a cleft in the coral and wrapped itself round my left ankle: the octopus to which it belonged couldn’t have weighed more than a few pounds but it still took most of my sock with it as I wrenched my leg away, which gave me some idea of what to expect if its big brother happened by.

      It was the longest, the most miserable night I have ever known. It must have been about midnight when the rain eased off but it continued in a steady drizzle until shortly before dawn. Sometimes I dozed off, sometimes Marie did, but when she did it was a restless troubled sleep, her breathing too shallow and quick, her hands too cold, her forehead too warm. Sometimes we both arose and stumbled precariously on the rough slippery rock to get our circulation moving again, but mostly we sat in silence.

      I stared out into the rain and the darkness and I thought of just three things during the interminable hours of that night: the island we were on, Captain Fleck and Marie Hopeman.

      I knew little enough about Polynesian islands, but I did recall that those coral islets were of two types: atolls, and barrier reefs for larger islands. If we were on the former, a broken, circular and probably uninhabited ring of coral islets, the future looked bleak indeed: but if it were part of a reef enclosing the lagoon round a large and possibly inhabited island, then we might still be lucky.

      I thought of Captain Fleck. I thought of how much I would give for the chance of meeting him again, and what would happen then, and I wondered why he had done what he had done and who was the man behind the kidnap and attempted murder. One thing seemed certain and that was that the missing scientists and their wives were going to stay missing: I had been classified as redundant and would never now find out where they were or what had happened to them. Right then I wasn’t so worried about them, the longing to meet up with Fleck was the predominant emotion in my mind. A strange man. A hard callous ruthless man but a man I would have sworn was not all bad. But I knew nothing of him. All I did know now with certainty was his reason for deciding to wait till nine o’clock before getting rid of us: he must have known that the schooner had been passing a coral reef and if they’d thrown us overboard at seven o’clock we might well have been washed up before morning. If we had been found, identified and traced back to the Grand Pacific Hotel, Fleck would have had a great deal of explaining to do.

      And I thought of Marie Hopeman, not as a person but as a problem. Whatever dark forebodings had possessed her had had no validity in themselves, they were just symptomatic of something else, and I no longer had any doubts about what that something else was. She was sick, not mentally but physically: the succession of bad flights from England to Suva and then the night on the boat and now all this all added up to far too little sleep and too little food, and the lack of those coupled with physical exhaustion had lowered her resistance till she was pretty open to anything that came along: and what was coming along was fever or chill or just plain old-fashioned ‘flu: there had certainly been plenty of that around when we had left London. I didn’t like to think what