Beyond the Poseidon Adventure Page 16

  He saw the entrance to the last duct at the top of the shaft, leaned over and swung himself into it. He was now at the very top of the inverted ship. He began crawling.

  “LIKE YOUR PRESENT, ROGO?”

  12

  For the second time that morning, the smartly painted pinnace from the Komarevo came up alongside the jutting remains of the Poseidon. This time it was followed by another, and both sat low in the still waters. In each boat there were eight men. Each one carried a Stechkin. Each one was uniformed in maroon sweater and roll-on woolen hat. They looked exactly like what they were: a war party.

  Captain Bela regarded them with pride. Their demeanor reflected his own firm belief in discipline and order. This time, he thought, there would be no mistakes.

  He checked his watch. It had taken him little more than half an hour to organize this expedition. A rescue flotilla could not possibly arrive for well over another hour. He had enough men to move the cargo expeditiously, and they were sufficiently well equipped in both arms and experience to cope with any further intrusions. Captain Bela drew on his cigar and, quite consciously allowing himself a little vanity, decided that he had recovered the situation to his satisfaction.

  Anton and the other two, he thought, would almost certainly be pursuing Jason and his friends through the ship. Perhaps they had killed them, perhaps not. If they returned by the time the gold had been moved to the Komarevo, well and good. If not, then they and any remaining survivors would die when the Poseidon finally sank. For sink it definitely would. The grenades on the belt around his waist might help to finish off the stricken ship. It would, after all, be the tidiest of endings to a messy affair. The Magt would, of course, be dragged down too, and the world would doubtless be appropriately saddened that a gallant rescue operation should end in such tragedy. But then, thought the captain, the world was easily saddened.

  With a flick of slim fingers, he sent the stub of the cigar hissing into the sea. He had never seen a sea so calm, he thought. It was as well. It would make the process of transferring the cargo that much easier and quicker.

  He rose in the bow as they tied up to the whale-shaped hulk and reached out for the ragged edge of the entrance they had cut out earlier in the day. He would lead the party on board. He raised himself with a thrust of the foot and felt the sharp edge of steel tear at his finger. “Damn!” he said, and dropped back down into the pinnace. Otherwise, the shot would have hit him between the eyes.

  He felt the light sweat cool his face, and held the cut finger to his lips. It must be Jason. He thought quickly and without panic. The only guns on board were the ones his men had. Somehow Jason and the others must have disarmed at least one of them. At the very most they could have three pistols, and they were unlikely to present much of an obstacle to his crew.

  Quickly he explained the situation to the two boatloads of men. “Go in commando style,” he instructed. “They can only get a sight of you when you are silhouetted against the sky. Roll in fast and they are bound to lose you in the dark. Make your way up into the stern, up under the prop shafts. There’s plenty of cover. All the engine-room machinery is smashed up.”

  Without question or hesitation, the men rose to obey him.

  “Did you get him?”

  Rogo answered Martin’s question with a disappointed shake of the head. “Naw, the bastard ducked just as I was squeezing off the shot. That’s one bullet wasted.”

  They were crouching behind a huge central steam turbine which, when the ship turned over, had been uprooted from its moorings and crashed down between the hold and the now drained shaft that led to the funnel. They had arrived in the empty engine room full of hope, and it was not until Klaas climbed the rope ladder that they saw the two boats packed with Komarevo men. The turbine provided the best cover, and, as Rogo had pointed out, it meant they could keep Bela from reaching the gold. Beyond that, there were no plans they could make.

  “How many did you say there were, Klaas?” Rogo asked.

  “Over a dozen,” the Dutchman replied. “As far as I could see they were all heavily armed. With those big automatics, I think.”

  “Holy Christ!” Rogo said, more to himself than to the others. He looked around at them and once again despaired. A Dutchman who didn’t like fighting, a haberdasher on one leg, a nurse, a schoolgirl, and a skin diver who was suspect anyway. His was the only gun, and they were facing over a dozen well-armed, well-trained killers. They might as well take on the entire marine corps!

  He was on his knees, peering around the side of the vast metal drum at the square of blue across the width of the ship. Behind them, a little to the right, the hold door stood open, and even in there the brightness of the morning caught the bars of gold. The heavy stench of the tiger was still in the air.

  “What kind of a chance have we got?” Martin asked. He was slumped against the turbine, his bared and crushed foot raised on a broken stanchion. His face seemed to have shrunk even smaller with pain and fear, and the terrier eagerness had gone from him.

  Rogo was past being considerate. He fell back on the sarcasm that was his customary defense. “Oh, no problem at all, Martin,” he said. “Just walk over there and tell that Commie pirate you gotta get back to open the shop and he’ll run ya home. What chance?”

  Coby’s eyes looked as big as dinner plates in her pretty face. “There must be something we can do, Mr. Rogo.”

  He looked over his shoulder and said, a little less unkindly, “Don’t forget that’s American dough in there. They’ll be along. We just gotta hope we can hold these sharks off long enough.” He lifted the barrel of the gun. “But how long d’ya figure it’ll take ’em to realize we only got one gun?”

  The nurse began to whimper. Hely, who had said nothing since her confrontation with Rogo, put an arm around her. Klaas consulted his watch. He looked very grave as he said to Rogo, “I cannot see any official rescue flotilla getting here yet. Any passing craft will simply assume that Bela’s salvage vessel is handling it.”

  Rogo’s eyes were still on the entrance, his gun cocked. “We might fool ’em for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. After that they’re gonna work out our firepower and the show’s over, folks.”

  He looked round at them all again. “I’m sorry,” he added, and they nodded mutely. They understood the frustration of his impotence. They understood too that the cop, tough as he was, had been under tremendous strain. He seemed lost without Jason now.

  Between gritted teeth, Rogo muttered, “Here they come, the stinking bastards!” The sill of the clean square of blue changed shape for a second as a flattened body rolled over the edge and they heard the bumping and clatter as it landed. Rogo fired, but they knew from his mumbled obscenity that he had missed. He steadied his arm against their metal defense bulwarks ready for the next one. Again the straight black line along the base of the blue square wavered, and again he signaled his failure with an oath.

  He turned and dropped onto his haunches among the others. “Let ’em come,” he said, and rested the gun barrel on the floor.

  The nurse stifled her sobs and whispered, “Mr. Rogo, please don’t give up. You’re our only hope.”

  His face looked aged and sunken as he glanced at her. “I’m just wasting bullets. I can’t get a clear shot at them there. We’ll just have to let ’em come in and see if we can pick ’em off then.”

  They could hear the scuffling of the Komarevo men swarming aboard. From the noise, it was clear that they were moving into the very end of the stern.

  Rogo flinched. A small, sharp object had landed on his head. He picked it up from beside his foot. It was a screw. Then he ducked as he felt another light smack, this time on the ear, and he rubbed the spot and mumbled, “What the hell . . .” and looked upwards.

  “Flies annoying you, Batman?”

  They all started at the familiar voice, and gazed up. Twenty feet above them, nonchalantly perched on a crosspiece of broken handrail like an owl on a branch, was Jason. He flipped anothe
r screw to Rogo, swung down to a lower pipe, and then jumped the rest. He landed squatting at Rogo’s feet, grinning at him and said, “I had to come back, Rogo. It’s the only game in town.”

  Hely’s face, set and silent before, came alive. She flung her arms round him and buried her beaming smile in his shoulder. Jason sowed a small kiss in her shining hair.

  “How in hell’s name . . .” Rogo began, but Jason cut him short. “Not now, Rogo. Explanations later, okay? We’ve got to entertain the visitors.” He thumbed towards the stern. “How many are there?”

  Grimly, the policeman answered, “Over a dozen. With Stechkins, and all we have is this pistol and three shots gone already.”

  He was surprised that Jason did not seem too dismayed by his gloomy outline of their position. All he said was a whispered, “Follow me, everyone,” and, ducking down, he shuffled towards the hold, giving a hushed commentary to Rogo behind him.

  “Remember my parcels, Rogo? Well, I guess it’s a little late for Christmas presents, but I got a little something specially for you. Thought of getting you a thumbscrew or a picture of Adolf Hitler . . .” He was in the back of the hold now, pulling at the smashed packing cases. “But I thought of what old Manny used to say, and got you . . . a surprise.”

  He turned round and threw something into Rogo’s hands. It was a rifle. An old rifle. A World War Two rifle. But it was a rifle.

  With a muted whoop of joy, Rogo dived in beside Jason. The case was packed with beautifully oiled and maintained Garand rifles, their polished wooden stocks gleaming, and from another damaged case Jason was prizing ammunition.

  They were all crowding round as Rogo passed out the weapons. From outside they heard the gunfire again. It beat out a sinister tattoo all around the engine room. Bela’s men were raking the whole place with bullets to try to locate them.

  The nurse refused Jason’s offer of a weapon. “But I will help with the ammunition,” she said. Everyone else was armed, and Jason was shepherding them out of the hold and back behind the safety of the turbine. He talked in urgent whispers all the time.

  “You handled one of these, Martin?”

  The shopkeeper replied, “Well, they’d been holding up all the stores around town so I went and took some lessons at the armory. Not with rifles, but the sergeant says I’m quite good if I keep my head . . .”

  “Great!” Jason dropped on one knee and leaned to look around the end of the metal barrier. He fired off an experimental shot, then another.

  “You okay?” Rogo asked Klaas. Then he saw that the captain was going through the manual of inspection of the professional soldier. He examined all the mechanisms, wiped off some oil, pulled back the firing bolt, and squinted down the barrel. Then he raised himself over the top of the turbine and fired steadily into the darkness.

  “Wow!” said Rogo. “Sorry, skipper.”

  The Dutchman spoke over his shoulder. “All Europeans of my age have handled guns, Mr. Rogo. We had a little problem when I was a young man. Perhaps you heard of it over there in America?”

  “Whaddya mean—all Europeans?” Rogo was kneeling beside Jason, and he too was firing. Then he continued the mood of genial whispered jousting. “Who got you outta that mess? I carried one these goddamn things from Omaha Beach to the Rhine.”

  “Oh, really? I didn’t know you’d been an honest man in your youth, Rogo,” Jason chipped in. His smile faded when he saw Hely. She was beside Klaas, and she was shooting with the accomplished steadiness of a professional. She saw his look. “Rabbit shooting,” she explained, and his grin returned.

  Even Martin was joining in, “Hey, Mr. Jason,” he said, in a muffled voice. “The address on those packing cases was Mexicana Street, Anaheim. There’s no Mexicana Street there I can recall.”

  “That’s right,” Jason’s reply was low but clear. “And these aren’t tins of tomatoes as it said in the manifest.” He bobbed around the turbine once more and took a fast shot. “Those Greeks didn’t ask too many questions if the money was okay.”

  “How the hell did you get here anyway?” Rogo asked Jason, between carefully taken shots. Jason explained in staccato sentences. He had climbed the central shaft to the bottom, now the top, of the ship, and made his way through the passages used by the engineers. He knew it was bound to lead into the engine room.

  As they crouched down to push in new clips, backs against the steel wall that protected them, Rogo asked, “And what happened to your playmate?”

  With mock grief, Jason whispered, “He went out to lunch with the tiger. They died in each other’s arms.”

  The silence from Bela’s men was shattered by sustained bursts of automatic fire. It was terrifyingly loud in the metal chamber, and Coby flinched as a wild fusillade combed their end of the room. But no bullets found their way into the sanctuary between the machine and the back of the bulkhead.

  Still the only light came through the six-foot square punched out of the side of the boat. Outside, the morning sun was stronger now, and the broad beam which penetrated the engine room half-lit a scene in which the participants could find no point of reference within their experience.

  As he had instructed, Bela’s men had fled to the far end of the room and taken up positions protected by the jumbled walls of dynamos, rotors, and generators. There they felt themselves to be completely safe, and began to pour burst after burst of gunfire across the room at the huge turbine which sheltered Jason’s oddly assorted fighting team.

  But they too were shielded by the wrecked machinery, and the Komarevo crew waited impatiently for a careless limb to show, or a too curious face to be raised. Their gunfire rattled futilely against the turbine and the bulkhead above them.

  In turn, Jason and Rogo and company soon found that they were unable to expose themselves for long enough to return fire. They were locked in a stalemate of safety.

  Jason assessed their situation. For all the hideous unfamiliarity of the setting, he realized that what they were fighting was simply a traditional guerilla battle. The battered machinery and the complex patterns of the torn piping, however eerie, were no different from the cliffs and hills and jungles of Vietnam, and victory would go to those who used the terrain intelligently. There must, he thought, be some way to break the stranglehold and turn the pressure on Bela.

  Then he had it. He briefed the others in a whisper, and saw small, grim smiles on strained faces.

  They knelt in a short straight line beneath the shelter of the turbine, all except the nurse, and lifted their rifles to an angle of forty-five degrees. The precision of their coordination contrasted oddly with their tattered appearance. They looked like some freakish platoon about to fire a military salute.

  “Now!” Jason’s command set all six guns cracking. Coby fell over backwards from the recoil, but rapidly resumed her position and started firing again. The Garand was too heavy for her to handle easily. Martin had to struggle to keep the angle accurate. They blasted shot after shot into the impenetrable blackness of the top of the hull.

  A scream, followed by furious shouting and maddened oaths, came from the far side of the room, and Jason knew his plan had worked. They had concentrated their fire into the curved shell of the hull where he judged it would rain ricochets on their smug enemies, and so it had. Certainly two or three of them had been hit by that random fusillade, and it would uproot them at least temporarily.

  Jason and Rogo rose shoulder to shoulder and lifted cautious heads. The Komarevo men were too busy scrambling to new positions to be alert now. Rogo caught a glimpse of a white face and quickly made a direct shot. The roar of rage told him he had scored. Jason too began to fire straight across the room into the darkness, and renewed sounds of panic showed he had added to their confusion. The stalemate was broken. Now Bela and his men were the ones under pressure, and they could not reverse the tactic because the bulkhead wall behind Jason offered no helpful angles.

  Rogo and Jason talked quietly as they watched, and fired off shots at every moving
shadow. It was the talk of comrades, of soldiers of action together, of men sharing the same threat and the same courage.

  “Like your present, Rogo?” Jason’s grin was reflected in his voice.

  “Hell, I like it okay, but Bela ain’t so impressed. So this was your little parcel, cowboy? I never took you for a gunrunner.” He said it without criticism, but Jason whipped back on the words. “I’m no gunrunner. Well, not what you think of one anyway. That’s Bela’s trade.”

  “Okay, okay. Cool it.” For once, it was the cop who was soothing the other man. “Where were they going, then?”

  “First they were going to some guys I know in Lebanon. That was when the Christians there were having a bad time. Now, I dunno. The Christians suddenly started behaving like lions, and I’m not sure I want to help them anymore. So maybe I’ll reroute them to Africa. There are some nice guys down there who are anxious to move along a couple of upstart dictators. Perhaps I can give them a hand.”

  There was a note of open admiration in Rogo’s reply. “Cowboy, you might look like a dopehead but you sure as hell know how to handle a gun. Vietnam?”

  “Yep.” Jason methodically sent three shots slapping off the side of the hull and grinned at the muffled crashing which followed. “Yep, I kinda got my head screwed up in Nam. Y’know?”

  To his surprise, Rogo nodded. “A lotta nice kids did.”

  They both ducked as sporadic bursts began to come back at them. Bela’s crew was obviously regrouping and recovering from the shock reversal.

  Rogo rose quickly, fired, then stooped and dropped the empty clip and picked up a new one. The nurse was scurrying from one to another with ammunition. The firing from the other side was building up again, and Martin and the others were shooting mostly in vain now.

  “So what’s with all this gunrun . . . dealing then?”

  “It sounds crazy, I know, but I thought maybe I could help some of the guys the world didn’t want to know about. I suppose I appointed myself as world sheriff.”