I drove down to the fort and spoke to the President’s secretary.
He was in a meeting, but he would see me at one o’clock if I would care to lunch with him in his office. I accepted the invitation and, to pass the hours until then, I drove up the track to Coolie Peak as far as the pick-up would take me. There I parked it and walked on to the ruins of the old look-out and signal station. I sat on the parapet looking out across a vista of sea and green islands while I smoked a cheroot and did my last bit of careful planning and decision-making, glad of this opportunity to make certain of my plans before committing myself to them.
I thought of what I wanted from life, and decided it was three things - Turtle Bay, Wave Dancer II and Sherry North, not necessarily in that order of preference.
To stay on at Turtle Bay, I had to keep a clean pair of hands in St. Mary’s, to have Wave Dancer II I needed cash and plenty of it, and Sherry North - well, that took plenty of hard thought, and at the end of it my cheroot had burned to a stub and I ground it out on the stone parapet. I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders.
“Courage, Harry me lad,” I said and drove down to the fort.
The President was delighted to see me, coming out into the reception room to welcome me and rising on tiptoe to place an arm around my shoulders and lead me into his office.
It was a room like a baronial hall with a beamed ceiling, panelled walls and English landscapes in massive ornate frames and dark smoky-looking oils. The diamon&paned window rose from the floor to the ceiling and looked out over the harbour, and the floor was lush with oriental carpets.
Luncheon was spread on the oaken conference table below the windows - smoked fish, cheese and fruit with a bottle of CUteau Lafite “62 from which the cork had been drawn.
The President poured two crystal glasses of the deep red wine, offered one to me and then plopped two cubes of ice into his own glass. He grinned impishly as he saw my startled expression. “Sacrilege, isn’t it?” He raised the glass of rare wine and ice cubes to me. “But, Harry, I know what I like. What is suitable on the Rue Royale isra necessarily suitable on St. Mary’s.”
“Right on, sir!” I grinned back at him and we drank. “Now, my boy, what did you want to talk to me about?”
I found a message that Sherry had gone to visit Missus Chubby when I arrived back at the shack, so I went out on to the veranda with a cold beer. I went over my meeting with President Biddle, reviewing it word for word, and found myself satisfied. I thought I had covered all the openings - except the ones I might need to escape through.
hree wooden cases marked “Canned Fish. Produce of Norway” arrived on the ten o’clock plane from the mainland addressed to Coker’s Travel Agency.
“Eat your liver, Alfred Nobel,” I thought when I saw the legend as Fred Coker unloaded them from the hearse at Turtle Bay and I placed them in the rear of the pick-up under the canvas cover.
“Until the end of the month then, Mister Harry,” said Fred Coker, like the leading man from a Shakespearian tragedy.
“Depend upon it, Mister Coker,” I assured him and he drove away through the palms.
Sherry had finished packing away the stores. She looked so different from yesterday’s siren, with her hair scraped back, dressed in one of my old shirts, which fitted her like a nightdress, and a pair of faded jeans with raggedy legs cut off below the knees.
I helped her carry the cases out to the pick-up, and we climbed into the cab.
“Next time we come back here we’ll be rich,” I said, and started the motor, forgetting to make the sign against the hex.
We ground up through the palm grove, hit the main road below the pineapple fields and climbed up the ridge. We came out on the crest above the town and the harbour.
“God damn it!” I shouted angrily, and hit the brakes hard, swinging off the road on to the verge so violently that the pineapple truck following us swerved to avoid running into our rear, and the driver hung out of his window to shout abuse as he passed.
“What is it?” Sherry pulled herself off the dashboard where my manoeuvre had thrown her. “Are you crazy?”
It was a bright and cloudless day, the air so clear that every detail of the lovely white and blue ship stood out like a drawing. She lay at the entrance to Grand Harbour on the moorings usually reserved for visiting cruise ships, or the regular mail ship.
She was flying a festival burst of signal flags and I could see her crew in tropical whites lining the rail and staring at the shore. The harbour tender was running out to her, carrying the harbour master, the customs inspector and Doctor Macnab.
“Mandrake?” Sherry asked.
“Mandrake and Manny Resnick,” I agreed, and swung the truck into a U-turn across the road.
“What are you going to do?“she asked.
“One thing I’m not going to do is show myself in St. Mary’s while Manny and his fly lads are ashore. I’ve met most of them before in circumstances which are likely to have burned my lovely features clearly into even their rudimentary brains.”
Down the hill at the first bus stop beyond the turn off to Turtle Bay was the small General Dealers” Store which supplied me with eggs, milk, butter and other perishables. The proprietor was delighted to see me and he flourished my outstanding bill like a winning lottery ticket. I paid him, and then closed the door of his back office while I used the telephone.
Chubby did not have a phone, but his next-door neighbotir called him to speak to me.
“Chubby,” I told him, “that big white floating brothel at the mail ship mooring is no friend of ours.”
“What you want me to do, Harry?”
“Move fast. Cover the water cans with stump nets and make like you are going fishing. Get out to sea and come around to Turtle Bay. We’ll load from the beach and run for Gunfire Reef as soon as it’s dark.” “I’ll be in the bay in two hours,“he said and hung up.
He was there in one hour forty-five minutes. One of the reasons I liked working with him is that you can put money on his promises.
As soon as the sun set and visibility was down to a hundred yards we slipped out of Turtle Bay, and we were well clear of the island by the time the moon came up.
Huddled under the tarpaulin, sitting on a case of gelignite, Sherry and I discussed the arrival of Man&ake in Grand Harbour.
“First thing Manny will do, he will send his lads out with a pocketful of bread to ask a few questions around the shops and bars. “Anyone seen Harry Fletcherr” and they’ll be queueing up to tell him all about it. How Mister Harry chartered Chubby Andrews’stump boat, and how they been diving looking for seashells. If he gets really lucky somebody will point him in the direction of Frederick Coker Esquire - and Fred will fall over himself to tell all, as long as the price is right
“Then what will he do? “He will have an attack of the vapours when he hears that I didn’t drown in the Severn. When he recovers from that, he will send a team out to ransack and search the shack at Turtle Bay. He will draw a dud card there. Then the lovely Miss. Lorna Page will lead them all to the alleged site of the wreck off Big Gull. That will keep them happy and busy for two or three days - until they find they have nothing but the ship’s bell.”
“Then?”
“Well, then Manny is going to get mad. I think Lorna is in line for some unpleasantness - but after that I don’t, know what will happen. All we can do is try to keep out of” sight and work like a tribe of beavers to get the Colonel’s goodies out of the wreck.”
The next day the state of the tides was such that we could not navigate the channel before the late morning. It gave us time to make preparations. I opened one of the cases of gelignite and took out ten of the waxy yellow sticks. I reclosed the case and buried it with the other two in the sandy soil of the palm gtove, well away from the camp.
Then Chubby and I assembled and checked the blasting equipment.
It was a home-made contraption, but it had proved its efficiency before. It consisted of two nine-volt transistor batteries in a simple switchbox. We had four reels of light insulated copper wire, and a cigar-box of
