Bluebolt One (17 page)

He was out all the rest of that day and a good deal of the next.

He came round slowly and found himself in bed in a small room with a single window looking out on to smoke-blackened brick. As he stirred a little, a girl who had been sitting by the bedside got up and leaned over him, smoothed his forehead, and he saw that she was a nurse.

Brightly she said, “There we are, then! How do you feel, Commander Shaw?”

He muttered with difficulty, “Perfectly bloody, if you really want the truth.”

“Bad headache?”

He winced. “An understatement.”

“It’ll pass.”

He thought; She does sound as though she really means that! In a feeble voice he asked, “Am I in hospital?”

She nodded, smiling down at him. “Yes, of course.”

“How . . . long have I been here?”

“Nearly twenty-four hours.”

“Oh. . . .” He didn’t tick over right away. “Twenty-four hours. . . ." Minutes later he had hoisted it in, and he knew there was something of tremendous urgency which he had to do, and if he didn’t do it right away there was going to be big trouble, because the birds would have flown from the nest well and truly already, and nobody except himself knew about Wiley. . . . He muttered something and tried to struggle up, but the young nurse pushed him down firmly. His head swam, the room rocked around him, and he lay still while she wiped a heavy, cold sweat from his face and neck. His mind was slipping away again now, he couldn’t remember, simply couldn’t remember the essentials . . . then he asked painfully, “How . . . long do I stop here?”

“That’s for the doctor to say. Not very long, though, if you take things quietly.”

“Take things quietly . . . Good God, Nurse. . . listen now.” He stopped. It was no good, it had gone again. He asked, “Is there much wrong with me?”

She laughed quietly, confidently. “Not a thing that a bit of rest won’t cure. You must have a very tough constitution, you know—or a lot of luck! They did all kinds of tests on you, but there’s nothing wrong at all.”

He nodded, and smiled up at her weakly, and then the mists closed in again.

After a while that dead-out sleep, the sleep of exhaustion and a small degree of shock, changed into a light and refreshing sleep, and when he woke again some hours later it was night and he felt a good deal better. This time he woke to full and immediate awareness of his surroundings and he saw a night nurse sitting sewing by a shaded table-lamp. She came over when she heard him stirring.

He grinned at her and said, “I do believe I’m going to live after all!”

Tweaking at a sheet, she said briskly, “There never was any doubt of
that
. . . good gracious me, the things patients say!” She went on, “I’ve orders to tell you, as soon as you wake—there’s some one waiting to see you. If you don’t feel like visitors I shan’t say you are awake. Well?”

He lifted himself on one elbow. There was a slight feeling of dizziness but it passed quickly. He asked, “Who’s the visitor, Nurse?”

She said, “A gentleman that’s been waiting for you in sister’s sitting-room. A Mr Latymer.”

“You’d better bring him in right away, please, Nurse. It’s important, and there’s—things—I’ve got to talk to him about.”

Latymer had a way with him, Shaw decided with amusement, there was no doubt about that. The nurse had seemed to want to stay in the room, but the Old Man had simply opened the door and glared at her, then barked at her not to come back unless she was sent for. She’d given that scarred, square face and the steel-green eyes just one astonished look and then she’d gone without another word, and Latymer, grinning away and dusting his hands together, had marched over to the bed. He came straight to the point. He said abruptly, “Well, my boy. Damned glad we got there in time.

Now—tell me exactly how you’re feeling. And I want the truth.”

Shaw said, “Better than I ever thought I would, sir. All things considered, I think I’m fairly fit.”

“Good.” The eyes examined him critically, brows thickly lowered. “Now—give me the whole story from top to bottom and in detail.”

Latymer listened intently and in silence for the most part, only asking a brief and pointed question here and there. When Shaw had finished he said harshly, “They’ll have got a flying start. Clear away by this time, I shouldn’t wonder. There’s already a warrent out for Canasset, and a full-scale search is on for the girl. The ports and airfields had a watch put on ’em as soon as we could arrange it—”

“When was that, sir?”

“Not till Canasset had had that good start, unfortunately. You see, there wasn’t anything to incriminate him personally at first so far as we knew—and his wife put us off with some yarn that he’d gone down to Plymouth for the week-end. She sounded as though she genuinely believed that, and Verity’s story tied up too at first. Anyhow, I had a check made on friend Canasset. The results were perfectly all right to begin with, but then later on some information came to hand that he was known to have Communist sympathies, for what that’s worth, and when we couldn’t find him in Plymouth—well, we went into action. By the way, I didn’t tell you when you mentioned it—we did get confirmation that the body in the pit was definitely MacNamara’s. So that settled him, poor feller—we cancelled the call for him right away. Pity, as it happens... if the call had still been out for him, we might’ve netted this whatsisname, Wiley, instead.” Shaw said, “I can’t understand why MacNamara was down there. You remember I said Wiley’s idea was for my death and Pelly’s to look natural. Well, MacNamara’s was obviously anything but that, and it’d have been suspicious just to find him there, I’d have thought. . . unless. . . .” He hesitated, thinking back to the pit.

Latymer moved impatiently. “Yes?”

“Well, I suppose he could have . . . floated in from somewhere else. Freed in some way, perhaps by the tidal movements. Could be that.” He added, “By the way, sir, have the police had any luck in finding Jiddle’s killers?”

Latymer shook his head. “They haven’t found a thing, I’m afraid. Well—now we’ll have to put out a call for this other black feller, Sam Wiley.” He swung away, walked up and down, hands clasped behind his thick back. He said. “I’d say it’s already a damn sight too late, though. Anyway, our net’s not all that foolproof even when we’re in time.”

“Where d’you think they’ll have made for, sir?”

“Africa—of course! Once they get there, we’ll have one hell of a job to pick them up, and you can bet they know it too. And there’s any amount of ways into Nogolia without being spotted—boats from ships lying off uninhabited strips of coast, planes landing up-country on the empty plateaux. . . .”

“Has the news got out that I’m alive, sir?”

“If it hasn’t already it soon will.”

“Have you heard from Debonnair, by the way—I mean, she’ll be worried if she thinks I’m—”

Latymer interrupted, “Yes, I have, and she’s in the picture.

That girl loves you, you know—” He broke off and looked down at him shrewdly. “Look here, Shaw. I want you to be quite honest and tell me when you’re fit to go, to move out of here and take a trip, that is. To hell with the doctors. You’re the best judge of how you feel, and they’ve already assured me there’s nothing basically wrong with you. Well?”

“I’m ready when you are, sir.”

Latymer put a large hand on his shoulder. “Good for you, my boy,” he said quietly. “But I do want you really fit. You’ll need to be. Have your sleep out for now, leave things to me meanwhile—stay here one more day and night, and then be ready to leave immediately after breakfast the next day. Report direct to Carberry. There’ll be some routine briefing, and then you’ll leave by air for Jinda via Paris, using a routine flight from there. I’ll want you to get up from Jinda to Manalati as unobtrusively as possible. Play this on your own for a while, and deal direct with the two top men at the station—Geisler and Hartog, who will have been warned to expect you. There’s one more thing, Shaw. Remember I spoke of the possibility that Edo might try to get at the Bluebolt station direct, if the indirect methods fail... well, the riots and so on aren’t making any headway against old Tshemambi—he’s sticking like a leech. That’s fine so far as it goes—but it does make me think something worse might happen, so just bear that in mind. I want you to sound the Bluebolt people out along those lines.”

Some thirty-six hours later Shaw, with a grip that Thompson had packed for him round in the Gliddon Road flat, left the Admiralty by car. One of the things somewhat on his mind was the report he had read some days before in those security screening records about Hartog having been in Russia after liberation from the Nazi concentration camp, and the fact that Hartog never spoke of this period of his life. That could mean anything or nothing, of course, and it might be a long shot to suggest that there was any connexion with current events. Certainly Carberry had seemed convinced there was nothing in it, and he generally had everything at his fingertips. . . .

Thompson drove him fast to a Royal Air Force station where he boarded a specially chartered civilian plane for Paris, where he would change on to an Air France jet for Jinda.

Three days earlier Canasset, in the name of Peters, had arrived in Madrid by air and had gone directly to a certain bar where he contacted Sam Wiley, who, with Gillian Ross, had made his way to the Spanish capital independently and by certain devious and well-prepared escape routes. In this bar they had a long interview with a diplomat who, had the Spanish authorities known he was there, would have been decidedly non persona grata. In the course of this interview Wiley was given his final instructions. Afterwards Canasset, his job concluded, began a long journey into Eastern Europe; Wiley and the girl got into a car and were driven at speed to a remote field some distance south of Madrid, where, in the gathering darkness, they boarded an aircraft which took off without delay. Soon after they landed at an airfield in the Sahara, south of Oran, where they changed planes, boarding a waiting jet in which they were the only passengers. This jet took off for Nogolia. It was still dark when they crossed the border and flew low over country covered with thick, close-growing jungle and ranges of hills. When they reached the high ground the pilot circled over a wide plateau, a natural landing-ground. After his second circuit he switched off his navigation lights three times in quick succession, and then a line of flaring torches were seen flickering beneath. Recognizing his runway lights, the pilot took his plane down to a neat landing.

Wiley and the girl, leaving the plane, were approached by an African who treated Wiley with tremendous respect and a kind of awe, and they were led down from the plateau towards a mountain roadway where they got into a big Cadillac saloon.

The African nodded at the driver, and the car went off at high speed towards the seaport and capital city of Jinda.

Above, the sky was a burning blue, a shimmering sky with its horizon hardening to a dull bronze. From almost overhead and seeming very near the sun blazed down, a huge fiery ball glinting and flashing like some giant metal reflector. Below was the thick cloud layer, with occasional gaps through which Shaw could glimpse the dark green jungle-line which seemed to go on for ever and ever, endlessly, a fitted carpet laid thick and lush across all the world, interlaced with the brown, snake-like twists of rivers.

Shaw looked down intently whenever his eye caught one of those gaps in the cloud’s blanket.

Somewhere, anywhere, down there Gillian Ross might be by now, suffering mentally and physically. Shaw grew cold at the thought... soon the jet circled to land at Jinda’s big, modem airport two miles outside the city itself. As they came lower and lower Shaw could see the tall, almost skyscraperish buildings lancing upward through low cloud this was an Africa he himself had never known on his previous brief visits, a progressive land, an age-old but at the same time a young and vigorous land, a land which could and would go far if only she was left to settle her own problems and not become a pawn between the Power blocs of the East and the West. Even now it needn’t necessarily be too late. . . .

There had been changes in Africa, but one thing was the same, Shaw found. As the doors were opened after the plane had touched down and taxied to the apron, the characteristic smell of Africa came into his nostrils, a smell which he hadn’t forgotten over the years. . . it was a different part of Africa which he’d known in the old days, but that smell was the same. It was an unnamable, indefinable smell but an unmistakable one, and a nostalgic one too, and it brought back instantly a vision of Sierra Leone, of sluggish brown waters and reddish earth, of chattering, half-naked happy children besieging the shore-bound sailors of the British Fleet as they landed at Freetown’s Government Wharf or at King Tom Pier. It brought back an image of grey, weather-scarred British warships lying with awnings spread at their moorings out in the bay; of the Victorian architecture and furnishings of the old Creole buildings in the town, and the women parading in the park on Sundays dressed like Victorian ladies, with coal-black smiling faces, regal in their incongruous grandeur; of winding roadways climbing through jungle on the way up to Hill Station above Lumley; of golden days on Lumley Beach itself, swimming in water unbelievably blue and keeping an eye open for the barracuda which lived in it; of days when with sudden vicious fury a squall would strike that bright blue water and turn it within seconds to a wind-lashed froth of raging, muddy brown which was unsafe even for a cruiser’s motor-cutter to cross. But it also brought the other things, the vague suggestion of the ancient pagan past, a hint of the dark secrets of those jungle lands and the closed tribal villages where the word of the ju-ju man was the only law they knew, the areas where Wiley would most probably have hidden and taken the girl.

As he came through the immigration control, where even his papers were given an exhaustive check which told him that Tshemambi’s Government officials were taking no avoidable chances, the rains, which had been temporarily stilled, broke out again accompanied by a long roll of thunder. As Shaw made for the local airline office to book for Manalati the whole place grew dark, and within seconds the solid water was slicing, battering down again from a leaden sky, bouncing on the roof of the airport building with a sound like a million riveters, and outside the river of water gathered, to rush down a shallow slope to the roadway in a brownish torrent.