'Don't be so damn stupid.' I could see by the expression on Griffith's face that he was regaining his first impression of me, one that had been far from favourable. 'They'll be waiting.'
'He can't afford to wait any longer. It's what time, now?'
'Almost seven.'
'He'll be on his way. He wouldn't risk the Black Shrike for a chance at my life. Don't try to stop me, please. I've something to do.'
I crawled out through the narrow mouth of the tunnel and looked around. For a few seconds I couldn't see anything, the shooting stabs from my kneecap blurred my eyes and put everything out of focus. Then the focus came back. There was no one there. No living person, that was.
There were three dead men lying outside the entrance. Two Chinese and Hewell, of course it would have been Hewell who would have been supervising the placing of the charges to blow in the mouth of the tunnel, and the exploding blocks of amatol had torn half the giant's chest away, anything less than that would never have taken his life. I saw the metallic snout of a gun barrel sticking out from under his body. I bent and pulled it clear with difficulty. It was fully loaded.
'It's all right,' I said, 'they've gone.'
Ten minutes later we were all making our way slowly down to the hangar. Brookman was right, I thought dully, it would be a week or more before I could walk properly again, but the navy boys took turns at helping me along, taking almost half my weight.
We came over the last ridge that separated us from the plain. The area round the hangar seemed deserted. A small coasting vessel was just clearing the reef. I heard Fleck curse bitterly, and then saw why: fifty yards out from the pier all you could see of his schooner was her masts and the top of her superstructure. LeClerc thought of everything.
Everyone was talking, talking and trying to joke and laughing, a nervous hysterical kind of laughter, but laughter all the same, you couldn't blame them, when you've been under the shadow of certain death and it suddenly lifts, it has that effect on nearly everybody. The strain of the long night, for the women the long weeks were over, the fear and the horror and the suspense lay behind, the world they'd thought was ended was just beginning again. I looked at the seven scientists and their wives, seeing the wives for the first time ever, and they were smiling and gazing into each other's eyes, each pair linked arm in arm. I couldn't look at them, I had to look away. No more gazing for me into Marie's eyes. But I'd walked arm in arm with her, though, once. Once for about two minutes. It hadn't been much. We might have been given more.
Only Fleck seemed depressed and heavy, only Reck out of all of them. And I didn't think it was because of what had happened to his schooner, not primarily anyway. He had been the only one of them who had ever known Marie, and when he'd called her a nice girl I'd gratuitously insulted him,
And he had a daughter of about the same age. Fleck was sad, he was sad for Marie. Fleck was all right, he'd pay no price for his earlier activities, he'd cleared the slate over and over again.
We came to the hangar. I cocked the gun in my hands and prayed that LeClerc had left an ambush party-or himself- behind to get us when the disappearing vessel had tricked us into thinking they had all gone. But there was no one there. Nor was there in any of the other huts, nothing but every radio set and transmitter smashed beyond repair. We came to the armoury, and I walked in through the open door and looked at the empty cot. I felt the crumpled coat that had served as a pillow and it was still warm. Some instinct made me lift it and under there was a ring. A plain golden ring she'd worn on the fourth finger of her left hand. The wedding ring. I slipped it over my little finger and left.
Griffiths gave instructions for the burial of the dead and then he and Fleck and I made our way slowly to the blockhouse, Fleck half-carrying me. Two armed sailors followed us.
The coaster was beyond the reef now, steering due west. The Black Shrike and Marie. The Black Shrike, carrying with it the threat of millions of ruined lives, of scores of great cities lying in the dust, of more carnage and sorrow and heartbreak than the world had known since time began. The Black Shrike. And Marie. The Marie who had looked into the future and found nothing there. The Marie who had said that one day I would meet up with a situation where my self-belief would be no help to me at all. And the day had come.
Fleck turned the key in the blockhouse door, pushed the Chinese back at the point of his gun, then turned him over to the sailors. We passed inside the second door and switched on the lights. LeClerc had smashed every other transmitting mechanism on the base, but he hadn't smashed the launch console, because he hadn't been able to get at it. He wouldn't have wanted to smash it anyway: for LeClerc did not know that the suicide circuit in the Black Shrike was armed.
We crossed the room, I bent down to switch on the generator and as I did my shirt pocket fell open and I saw for the first time and remembered for the first time, the little note Fleck had given me. I picked it up and smoothed the creases.
There were only a few words altogether. It said:
'Please forgive me Johnny. I've changed my mind about not marrying you-someone has to or you'll be in trouble all your life.
P.S. Maybe I love you a little, too.' Then, at the foot: T.P.S. You and me and the lights of London.'
I folded the note and put it away. I adjusted the periscope above my head and could clearly see the
Twelve seconds. Twelve seconds it took from the moment of pressing the button until the suicide circuit was fully armed. Twelve seconds. I stared down at my wrist-watch, seeing the sweep second hand jerking steadily forward, wondering vaguely whether the charge would only merely blow the Shrike apart or whether, as Fairfield had suspected, there would be a sympathetic detonation of the solid fuel and the Black Shrike blow itself out of existence. Not that it mattered now. Two seconds. I stared blindly into the eyepiece of the periscope, all I could see was a misted blur, then leaned on the destruct button with all the weight of my arm.
The Black Shrike blew itself out of existence. Even at that distance the violence of the explosion was terrifying, a huge spouting volcano of seething boiling white water that drowned the shattered vessel in a moment of time, then a great fiery column of smoke-tipped flame that reached up a thousand feet into the blue of the morning, and vanished with the moment of seeing. The end of the Black Shrike. The end of everything.
I turned away, Fleck's arm round me, and stumbled out into the sparkling brightness of a new day, and as I did I heard the heavy rumble of the explosion rolling in from the sea and echoing back from the silent hill beyond.
Epilogue
A small dusty man in a small dusty room. That's how I always thought of him, just a small dusty man in a small dusty room.
He'd jumped to his feet when I'd entered, and now he was hurrying round the desk, coming towards me, taking me by my good arm and helping me towards the chair in front of his desk. The royal treatment for the returned hero, I'd have taken long odds that he'd never done anything like this before, he hadn't even bothered to rise from his chair the first time I'd seen Marie Hopeman walk into that room.
'Sit down, sit down, my boy.' The grey lined face was alive with concern, the steady watchful green eyes mirrored the worry that this man almost never showed. 'My God, Bentall, you look awful.'
There was a mirror behind his desk, small, fly-blown and covered with dust like everything else in that room, and he wasn't exaggerating any that I could see. Left arm in a black linen sling, right hand holding the heavy stick that helped me along, bloodshot eyes and pale sunken cheeks with the great livid weal that ran from temple to chin, if I could get into the market quick I could make a fortune hiring myself out to haunt houses.
'I look worse than I really am, sir. I'm just tired, that's all.' God only knew how tired I was, I hadn't slept a couple of hours in the two days it had taken me to fly home from Suva.
'Have you had anything to eat, Bentall?' I wondered drily when this room had last seen such a display of
