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 that 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. Cheek.”
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 at our cringing wounded eyes with all the strength of a dozen noonday suns while it momentarily highlight 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 the fraction of a second though 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 halfway 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 at us over the surface of the sea. Then all was silence, profound and deathly.
“Well, Dr. Caroline,” I said conversationally, “at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that the damned 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 all of them to find his voice.
“That’s it, then, Captain Bullen. All gone up in smoke. Your ship and my one hundred and fifty 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 Harms Worth 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 forward 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 they 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 forward twenty crates forward deck marked turbines Nashville Tennessee but repeat but in forward twenty crates afterdeck marked generators Oak Ridge Tennessee: indications you may be running into hurricane essential secure afterdeck cargo earliest: from the Office of the Minister of Transport by 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 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 fiancee. We’re getting married next month.”
“His fiancee? Getting getting married next month?” In spite of the pain Captain Bullen propped himself up on one elbow, stared uncomprehendingly at each one 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.”
