transmit, raised the antenna and set the cipher numbers on the Kurier.[31] I cranked the handle at twenty-three minutes past the hour (as our arrangement with R.N. Gibraltar demanded) and then put the apparatus away.
Charly brought tea. I told her I had sent a signal to London and she was now free to take any action she wished in respect of the narcotics processing. I also cautioned her that under the Official Secrets Act any mention of the operation in which we had been engaged at Albufeira was actionable, and that if there was any reason to suspect her of indiscretion in this respect her employment by the Federal Narcotics Bureau in the U.S.A. made her liable for trial as an agent of a foreign power. I thanked her for the tea and gave her a reassuring and not too brotherly kiss.
‘You must row me out to H.K.’s boat,’ I said. I was dog-tired.
Charly brought the dinghy alongside the forty-foot cabin cruiser with skill befitting an admiral’s daughter. I scrambled on to the teak-laid deck in my stockinged feet — I couldn’t risk leaving wet footmarks across it. Charly spun the dinghy round and rowed back to the cove. I watched the cliff-top and willed Fernie Tomas not to appear until she was over the headland by the steep high path. Then I walked across the bridge and got into the big stowage locker under one of the extra bunks. It was a bit coffin-like, but I jammed a pencil under the lid, which gave me air, although not enough to dispel the smell of tar and mothballs. I waited.
Something struck the side of the boat with a thud. It wasn’t very Royal Navy and I began to wonder whether it was Fernie Tomas. Perhaps H.K. had lured me into a trap. I flushed with sudden fear at the thought of this locker really becoming a coffin.
A woman’s voice — Fernie’s wife — gabbled in Portuguese, the dinghy was drifting away. Hold the rope. Couldn’t he help her. Take the suitcase. There is water in the bottom of the boat. An oar has slipped into the water. The conversation went the way it does when women are in boats.
I heard Fernie’s voice telling her to hurry in rapid Portuguese. Reassuring and direct. I realized why he had been so taciturn when I had seen him before. His Portuguese had a strong English accent. There were splashes and thumps, and then a third voice, rather higher than Fernie’s, which spoke least of the three. They seemed to be an age getting aboard, and then I heard the woman’s voice, this time from some way off. She was returning to the shore in the dinghy. There was a click as someone switched on the small light over the controls. If I held my face horizontal, with my ear pressed against the cold locker-lid, my left eye had a narrow range of vision that included the top half of the person at the controls.
I could see Fernie in profile — the egg-shaped head with its black domed moustache hanging over the mouth. Upon his head was the black trilby hat of the peasant. The anchor came up like a curtain and the motors beat a drum-roll as we began the last act at Albufeira. Fernie engaged the screws and I felt the water thrash under the hull. The light above his head threw his eye sockets in black piratical patches. His hands moved across the controls, articulate and smooth, his head watched the beams, the compass, the rev. counters. This was a Fernie I had never seen, Fernie at sea, Fernie the sailor. From the seat at the controls he couldn’t see the ship’s clock. Every few moments he would call to the boy with him, ‘What time is it?’ and the boy would tell him.
He moved the throttles as far forward as they could go and at 3,000 r.p.m. the hull began hammering against the water like a pneumatic drill. When he was satisfied with the course, Fernie told the boy to hold the wheel steady. I heard the clicks of a suitcase being unlocked. I pushed my ear harder against the lid of the locker and raised it two inches. The boy was staring into the dark, while Fernie crouched on the floor over a radio chassis into which he was pushing small valves. Then his footsteps clattered down the saloon staircase and he reappeared with a black cable from the 24-volt supply to which he connected the radio machinery. He shouted, ‘Port — keep the lubber line on 240.’ The boy he had brought aboard was Augusto, who had secured a lock of Fernie’s hair for me.
Augusto sat on the high stool like a child at a tea-party, holding the wheel tightly between his small grubby hands. Fernie spoke in Portuguese about ‘the strong American at the railway station’; it must have been a question, for Augusto said that ‘the strong American’ (which was what the local people called H.K.) had unloaded a crate of sardines at the station to be put on the morning train to Lisbon.
There was a click and Augusto was bathed in reflected light as Tomas moved the beam of the big searchlight out across the waves. Slivers of rain and water droplets snipped at Augusto’s halo as the boat slammed into the swell and the sound of shipped water rushed along the deck outside. The little radio had warmed up and emitted a high-pitched note like a badly adjusted TV set. Tomas reappeared; his hand was on the radio. He tuned it. ‘Make it 245,’ he shouted above the noise.
I felt the boat vibrate as it turned at high speed. So far, and then it straightened again.
Tomas’s hand came into my view and he moved the radio. The signal it was receiving became stronger. ‘250,’ he shouted, and in his excitement broke into a gabble of Portuguese as he demanded that Augusto should give it more throttle. Augusto said it was as far advanced as it could get, and he pushed at the big levers with his child’s hands in order to prove it. Suddenly from the radio came a sound like ‘The Flight of the Bumble Bee’ played at double speed on a flute. Tomas put the set down roughly and moved out of my sight. Augusto’s head was one moment illuminated by an intense light-beam and the next moment drawn in dark silhouette against the bright heaving water.
Tomas was sweeping the ocean, looking for something in the roaring foam. The something was a metal container.
The flute-like sounds of the high-speed Morse stopped and the steady whistle replaced it. There was a cracking sound, and for some minutes I puzzled over it. It was difficult to imagine an ex-R.N. officer slapping his own face in Latin excitement and anger. ‘Too late!’ he shouted to Augusto, ‘too late, too late, too late, it’s down again to the sea bed.’ He snatched the wheel from Augusto and spun it viciously. The boat slid sideways, uncontrolled, the propellers screaming to get a hold on the water as the deck heeled over towards the dark sea.
It was unfortunate that I chose that moment to emerge. I fell forward, sprawling across the deck with my knees still trapped in the locker. My face walloped against the starboard bunk, my arm twisted under me, and I heard my Smith & Wesson pistol slide forward and drop with a crash into the saloon. ‘Steady amidships,’ I heard Fernie call, and the deck came level.
‘Get on your feet,’ Fernie said, like something out of a Greyfriars school story. I wasn’t too keen to get on my feet if it meant I was to be knocked down. On the other hand, lying there could earn me a slam on the kisser too.
‘I don’t want to fight you, Fernie,’ I said.
‘I’m going to kill you,’ said Fernie. He didn’t say it like a killer but like a prefect about to administer a thrashing.
‘You are making a mistake, Fernie,’ I said. But it was no use; when a man has fitted into the system as badly as Fernie had done, he has stockpiled spite and sadness, rage and revenge, until violence has built up under the surface like boiling lava.
Augusto had the boat on an even keel; he throttled back slightly. Fernie faced me across the bridge. He advanced slowly, keeping an even balance. His eyes stared into mine, sizing me up and judging my probable actions. We were an arm’s length apart when his hands moved slowly and easily upward. He put his hands higher than his waist and I detected a very slight turn of the shoulders. It told me what I wanted to know. Punching fighters hold themselves in a boxing stance, one hand and one foot slightly advanced. Judo fighters stand flat. Fernie was a left-handed puncher.
A rivulet of sea-water meandered across the deck, caught the light and became a scimitar under Fernie’s feet. I opened my left hand and advanced it in a protective, flinching manner across my chest and towards his rocksteady advanced right fist.
I watched his eyes deciding that I was going to be a pushover. He decided to clip me with a short left jab. My body was wide open. My fingers closed upon his advanced cuff, as my left toe kicked his right ankle under him. Fernie grabbed at my extended left knee to spin me to the ground. It was the correct counter but he was slow, far too slow. Before I had pulled his sleeve more than an inch to the left he’d lost balance. A man off balance thinks of nothing but getting balanced again; aggression disappears. He began to fall. My left hand pulled and continued to pull as I turned to my left. Right hand high. My turn was complete, right armpit clamped upper arm, left hand threatened his ulnar and radius bones. I heard a sharp intake of breath against my ear, and saw Augusto’s face turn towards us, his eyes like Belisha beacons.
