The Saint in Miami

closely watched to see who else will get in touch with them. The guy listening on the wire will get a big lack out of it when you talk to Nachlohr-that is, if Comrade Nachlohr is still in a place where he can receive telephone calls.'

The Saint took another pull at his cigarette, and his smile became even more demoralising as he drew reckless strength from the reactions that their faces were less quick to conceal than his.

'And there's one other thing you may have forgotten,' he went on, in the same blithe and bantering voice. 'You remember the letter I told you about that Gilbeck had written? Well, when I finally found out where this base was, I brought it up to date with some postscripts of my own before we started off on this trip and mailed it off to Washington in case of accidents. I'll admit I hoped to be able to rescue all the hostages before the big guns went off. But in a few hours they'll be going off just the same ... So what with one thing and another, Heinrich, old Drekwurst, it looks as if you're going to have to make a lot of good excuses to your Fuhrer.'

3 It worked.

It had to. The bluff was flawlessly played, as few living men but Simon Templar could have played it; but that only gave it a little extra certainty. The barest essential minimum of confidence would have served almost as well. For its real magnificence was in the basic conception.

It was unanswerable. Friede and March might suspect that an indefinite amount of it was bluff-although Simon had said it in a way that would have left only the most optimistic opposition any grounds for pinning much faith to that idea. They might have some evanescent motes of doubt. But doubt was the only thing that fundamentally had to be achieved. Doubt would work just as effectively both ways. For the stakes were too high to let Friede and March take the gam­ble. They couldn't even dare to waste precious time on an in­spirational chance which if it failed would leave them worse off than before.

Simon read all these things in their faces, and knew the lift of a forlorn triumph which made every sacrifice worth while.

Friede stared at him with those vengefully hooded eyes.

'You sent that information to Washington?'

'By air mail,' Simon confirmed, and only wished he had had enough foresight to make it true. 'They've probably got it by now, and I expect the Navy and the Coastguard and the Marines will be on their way before morning.'

Randolph March loosened his collar.

'They don't have to find anything,' he said. 'We can-can kill all these people and sink them in the swamp. Nobody could find them. Then we all say that Gilbeck must have gone off his head, and everybody knows the Saint's reputation -if we send the submarine out to sea-'

'You sickly fool!' Friede turned on him with impersonal savagery. 'What about the Indian? And how do you think you can discredit Gilbeck as easily as that? What about the stores and other things here that a naval expert would recognise?'

'We could sink them in the river-'

'Without leaving any traces-in the time we've got? And wouldn't the investigators think of that? It would only take one diver to find them.'

'Then what can we do?'

Friede stood with the immobility of a carving in Saxon stone, yet in his stillness he epitomised all the qualities that had been developed and glorified in the system which he represented-the crude driving force and brutality of the Vandals who had left their tribal name to posterity as a synonym for the destroying barbarian, fatefully combined with an infinitude of patient and painstaking and pitiless cunning that the Mongol invaders had left Eastern Europe for a legacy that was to filter westwards and lend its aid to the creation of a greater shambles than Genghis Khan ever aspired to. There was no mistaking the power and competence of the man: the only mystery was the strange contagious warp which had taken those abilities and bent them irrevocably to the service of death and desolation.

'We have to leave here,' he said at last; and his voice was bluntly commonplace and precise, considering nothing but the immediate tactical problem. 'Another base can be found for the submarine, probably; but in any case it must not be captured at all costs . . . I'm afraid you will have to lose the March Hare.'

'Must I?' March sounded like a pouting child.

'The choice is yours. But you cannot stay here. On the other hand, if you try to escape in the March Hare, the Coastguard seaplanes will find it without much trouble. The submarine has at least a good chance of escape. I think you would do much better to come with us. There will be other work for you, and you can be sure that the Fatherland will not forget you.'

The guard of seamen stood stiffly around the room like sol­diers on parade, like robots, without initiative or feeling of their own. It gave Simon an eerie sensation to watch them. They would live or die, kill or be killed, as they were commanded, and all the time think only along one narrow track of blind mechanical obedience. They were a deadlier army than Karel Capek ever dreamed of in his fantasy of the revolt of the robots. And the Saint had a frightening prescience of the holocaust that must lay waste the earth before free and sentient men could triumph over those swarming legions from whom everything human had been stolen but their bodies and their ability to carry out commands. They were the new zombies, the living dead who existed only to interpret the ambitions of a neurotic autocrat more sinister than Nero . . .

Friede snapped an order at one of them to fetch some rope, and the man saluted and hurried to the door. Before he could get out he had to halt, salute again, and make way for a young man who had arrived at the entrance at the same moment.

The young man wore only a white undershirt and a pair of soiled cotton trousers, but his cap was worked with an officer's gold thread. He had very blond hair and a callous high-cheekboned face, and his blue eyes had the inner unseeing brightness of a fanatic. He held a revolver in one hand. He looked at Friede and raised his other hand and said: 'Heil Hitler.'

'Heil Hitler,' responded Friede almost perfunctorily and went on in clipped methodical German. 'Lieutenant, it has become necessary to remove the submarine immediately. You will prepare to sail at once. Take on all the fuel you can carry, also all the spare food supplies from the March Hare. You will also take as much as possible of the reserve ammunition and torpedoes from the stores on shore here. You will be ready in not more than two hours. I shall be going with you myself, and I shall give you your destination later. That is all.'

'Jawohl, Herr Kapitan.'

The lieutenant raised his hand again, turned on his heel and went out. His young hard voice began rattling its own or­ders outside.

A moment later the seaman returned with a full coil of rope. Friede jerked his hand curtly at the five prisoners.

'Search them and tie them up. Use another rope to tie them to the beds. And be sure that both jobs are well done.'

Randolph March lighted a cigarette with hands that were not quite perfectly steady. Then he put the hands in his pockets and gazed about the room, trying not to pay too much attention to what was going on, and taking especial care not to directly meet the eyes of any of the captives. It was a different approach from that of Friede, who followed every move with implacable if unmoving vigilance. But in his own way March was trying to ape the captain's cold-blooded self-possession, although the faint shine of moisture on his forehead and the almost imperceptible whitish lines around his mouth worked against him.

'What are you going to do with them?' he asked.

'Leave them here,' replied Friede, without taking his eyes from what the seaman was doing, and in a tone that some­how seemed to leave the trend of the sentence unfinished.

March puffed his cigarette jerkily.

'Why don't we take the girls?'

'What for?'

'Er-hostages. We might still be followed. But even the Navy might hesitate to attack us if they knew we'd got them on board.'

'It might also help to relieve your own boredom,' said the captain cynically.

March swallowed.

Friede switched a glance to him for just long enough to sum him up like a butcher inspecting a sample of