started to drag him across the wet deck. It was less than ten feet to the ship’s rail. I dropped him, located the hinged section of the teak rail, fumbled for the catch, released it, swung the rail through 180 degrees, and snapped it back in its open position.
I caught the guard by his shoulders, eased the upper part of his body over the second rail, then tipped the legs high. The splash he made couldn’t have been heard thirty feet away. Certainly no one in number four hold or under the gun tarpaulin could possibly have heard anything.
I ran back to where Dr. Caroline was sitting on the lower steps of the companionway. Maybe he was just obeying the order I’d given him, but probably he was just too dazed to move anyway. I said, “quick, give me your wig.”
“What? What?” My second guess had been right. He was dazed.
“Your wig!” It’s no easy feat to shout in a whisper, but I almost made it.
“My wig? but but it’s glued on.”
I leaned forward, twisted my fingers in the temporary thatch, and tugged. It was glued on all right. The gasp of pain and the resistance offered to my hand showed he hadn’t been kidding: that wig felt as if it was riveted to his skull. It was no night for half measures. I clamped my left hand over his mouth and pulled savagely with my right. A limpet the size of a soup plate couldn’t have offered more resistance, but it did come off. I don’t know how much pain there was in it for him, but it certainly cost me plenty: his teeth almost met through the heel of my palm.
The machine gun was still in his hand. I snatched it away, whirled, and stopped, motionless. For the second time in a minute I could see rain slanting whitely through the vertical beam of a torch. That meant only one thing: someone was climbing up the ladder from the bottom of the hold.
I reached the ship’s side in three long steps, placed the wig in the scuppers, laid the gun on top of it, raced back to the companionway, jerked Dr. Caroline to his feet, and dragged him towards the bo’sun’s store, less than ten feet inboard from the companionway. The door was still less than halfway shut when Carreras appeared over the coaming, but his torch wasn’t pointing in our direction. I closed the door silently until only a crack remained.
Carreras was closely followed by another man, also with a torch. Both of them headed for the ship’s side. I saw the beam of Carreras’ torch suddenly steady on the opened rail, then heard the sharp exclamation as he bent forward and peered in the scuppers. A moment later he was erect again, examining the gun and the wig he held in his hand. I heard him say something short and staccato, repeated several times. Then he started talking rapidly to his companion, but it was in Spanish and I couldn’t get it. He then examined the inside of the wig, indicated something with the torch beam, shook his head in what might have been sorrow but was more probably exasperated anger, flung the wig over the side; and returned to the hold, taking the Tommy gun with him.
His companion followed.
“Our friend didn’t seem too happy,” I murmured.
“He’s a devil, a devil!” Dr. Caroline’s voice was shaking; only now was he beginning to realise the narrowness of his escape, how closely death had brushed him by. “You heard him. One of his own men dead and all he could call him was a crazy fool, and he just laughed when the other man suggested they turn the ship to look for him.”
“You understand Spanish?”
“Pretty well. He said something like: ‘just like that sadistic so-and-so to force Caroline to open the rail so that he could see what was coming to him.’ he thinks I turned on the guard, grabbed his gun, and that in the fight, before we both went overboard, my wig was torn off. There was a handful of my hair sticking to the underside of the wig, he says.”
“Sorry about that, Dr. Caroline.”
“Good God, sorry! You saved both our lives. Mine anyway. Sorry!” Dr. Caroline, I thought, was a pretty strong nerved person; he was recovering fast from the shock. I hoped his nerves were very strong indeed; he was going to need them all to survive the ordeal of the next few hours. “It was that handful of hair that really convinced him.”
I said nothing, and he went on: “please tell me exactly what is going on.” For the next five minutes, while I kept watch through that crack in the doorway, Dr. Caroline plied me with questions and I answered them as quickly and briefly as I could. He had a highly intelligent, incisive mind, which I found vaguely surprising, which in turn was a stupid reaction on my part: you don’t pick a dim-wit as the chief of development for a new atomic weapon. I supposed his rather comical-sounding name and the brief glimpse I’d had of him the previous night a man bound hand and foot to a four-poster and looking into a torch beam with wide and staring eyes looks something less than his best had unconsciously given me the wrong impression entirely. At the end of the five minutes he knew as much about the past developments as I did myself; what he didn’t know was what was to come, for I hadn’t the heart to tell him. He was giving me some details of his kidnap when Carreras and his companion appeared.
They replaced battens, tied the tarpaulins, and went forward without any delay. That meant, I supposed, that the fusing of the auxiliary time bombs in the other two coffins was complete. I unwrapped the torch from its oilskin covering, looked round the store, picked up a few tools, and switched off the light.
“Right,” I said to Caroline. “Come on.”
“Where?” he wasn’t keen to go anywhere, and after what he’d been through I didn’t blame him.
“Back down that hold. Hurry. We may have little enough time.”
Two minutes later, with the battens and tarpaulin pulled back into place as well as possible above us, we were on the floor of the hold. I needn’t have bothered bringing any tools; Carreras had left his behind him, scattered carelessly round. Understandably he hadn’t bothered to remove them: he would never be using those tools again.
I gave Caroline the torch to hold, selected a screw driver, and started on the lid of the brass plaqued coffin.
“What are you going to do?” Caroline asked nervously. “You can see what I’m doing.”
“For pity’s sake be careful! that weapon is armed!”
“So it’s armed. It’s not due to go until when?”
“Seven o’clock. But it’s unsafe, highly unsafe. It’s as unstable as hell. Good God, Carter, I know. I know!” his unsteady hand was on my arm, his face contorted with anxiety. “The development on this missile wasn’t fully completed when it was stolen. The fuse mechanism was only in an untried experimental state, and tests showed that the retaining spring on a trembler switch is far too weak. The twister is dead safe normally, but this trembler switch is brought into circuit as soon as it is armed.” “And?”
“A jar, a knock, the slightest fall — anything could overcome the tension of the spring and short-circuit the firing mechanism. Fifteen seconds later the bomb goes up.”
I hadn’t noticed until then, but it was much warmer down in that hold than it had been on deck. I raised a soaking sleeve in a half-witted attempt to wipe some sweat off my forehead.
“Have you told Carreras this?” the warmth was also affecting my voice, bringing it out as a harsh, strained croak.
“I told him. He won’t listen. I think — I think Carreras is a little mad. More than a little. He seems perfectly prepared to take a chance. And he has the twister tightly packed in cotton wool and blankets to eliminate the possibility of a jar.”
I gazed at him for a long moment without really seeing him, then got on with the next screw. It seemed much stiffer than the last one, but it was just possible that I wasn’t applying so much pressure as I had been before. For all that I had all the screws undone inside three minutes. Gently I slid off the lid, placed it to one side, slowly peeled back a couple of blankets, and there lay the twister. It looked more evil than ever.
I stood up, took the torch from Caroline, and said, “armed, eh?”
“Of course.”
“There are your tools. Disarm the bloody thing.”
He stared at me, his face suddenly empty of expression. “That’s why we’re here?”
“Why else? surely it was obvious? get on with it.”
“It can’t be done.”
“It can’t be done?” I caught him by the arm, not gently. “Look, friend, you armed the damned thing. Just
