Fear is the Key (11 page)

I felt tired when I got back to the rubber dinghy
and hauled myself aboard. I felt tired because
fifteen minutes' hard swimming in an oxygen
outfit would make anybody tired: but I knew too
well if I'd found what I'd been looking for tiredness
would never have touched me. I'd banked heavily
on finding what I'd been looking for in on or under
that ship. I felt let down.

I felt tired and low and dispirited and cold. I
wished I could smoke. I thought of a crackling
wood fire, of steaming coffee and a long long
nightcap. I thought of Herman Jablonsky sleeping
peacefully in his big mahogany bed back in the
general's house. I stripped off mask and cylinder,
kicked the flippers off my feet, pulled on a pair of
shoes with numbed and fumbling fingers, flung
my pants, coat and hat up on the deck of the
oiler and dragged myself up after them. Three
minutes later, dressed in my outer clothes and
dripping like a blanket that's just been hauled
from a wash-boiler, I was on my way up the
enclosed gangway to the well-deck of the oil rig
a hundred feet above my head.

Drifting grey cloud had washed the last of the
starlight out of the sky, but that didn't help me
any. I'd thought the overhead lamp illuminating
the gangway had been weak, but it hadn't, it
had only been distant. By the time I was ten
feet from the underside of the platform it was a
searchlight. And if they kept a gangway watch?
Did I tell them I was the Second Engineer from
the oiler and was suffering from insomnia? Did I
stand there and spin a plausible story while the
moisture dripping down under my pants from
the diving-suit formed a pool of water under my
feet and my vis-à-vis examined with interest the
ruched high-necked glistening rubber where my
collar and tie ought to have been? I had no gun,
and I was prepared to believe that anyone in any
way associated with General Ruthven and Vyland
pulled on his shoulder holster before his socks
when he got up in the morning: certainly everyone
I'd met so far had been a walking armoury. And if a
gun were pulled on me? Did I start running down
a hundred and thirty steps while someone picked
me off at their leisure? Of course I didn't have to
run, the fire-escape gangway was only enclosed on
three sides, but the fourth opened seawards and I
wouldn't bounce far off that maze of valves and
pipes on the oiler below. I concluded that any
halfway intelligent man would have gone straight
back down.

I went right on up.

There was no one there. The gangway emerged
in an alcove closed off on three sides – by the railed
platform edge on one side, by high steel walls on
the other two. The fourth side gave directly on to
the well-deck where the crane was. What little I
could see of this well was brightly illuminated and
I could hear the clank of machinery and the voices
of men not thirty feet away. It didn't seem like a
good idea to wander straight out into their midst
so I looked for another way out. I found it at once,
a set of steel rungs built into one of the twelve-foot
high steel bulkheads by my side.

I went up those, flattening myself out as I went
over the top, crawled a few yards then stood up
behind the shelter of one of the huge pillars. I
could see the whole panorama of the oil rig now.

A hundred yards away, on the larger raised
platform, to the north, was the derrick itself, looking
more massive than ever, with control cabins
at its base and men moving around: under the
surface of that platform, I supposed, would be the
power-generating machinery, the living accommodation.
The smaller platform to the south, the
one on which I stood, was almost completely bare
with a semi-circular extension reaching out over
the sea to the south. The purpose of this large
cleared space baffled me for a moment and then
something clicked in my memory: Mary Ruthven
had said that the general normally commuted
between oil-rig and shore in his helicopter. The
helicopter would need a landing-ground. This was
it.

On the well-deck between the two platforms,
almost at my feet, men were moving large barrels
with the aid of a tracked crane, trundling them
into a brightly-lit opening half-way along the high
bulkhead on the northern platform. Oil would be
piped aboard, so those barrels could only be ‘Mud',
a chemical mixture of barites used for forcing down
under pressure the cement that formed the outer
casing of the drill hole. There was a whole series
of those big storage sheds, most of them open,
extending right across the width of the rig. There,
if anywhere, would be what I was looking for.

I crossed to the far side of the south platform,
found another set of rungs and dropped down to
the well-deck. There was nothing to be gained by
caution or stealth now; apart from the fact that
they would only excite suspicion, the time factor
was becoming all-important: with the weather
steadily worsening – the wind now seemed twice
as strong as it had been half an hour previously
and it wasn't just a factor of the height – Captain
Zaimis would be climbing up the mast. Perhaps he
might even be forced to take off without me. But
there was no future in that thought and certainly
none for me. I put it out of my mind and crossed
to the first of the storage bays.

The door was held on a heavy steel latch,
unlocked. I opened the latch, pushed back the
door and passed inside. It was pitch dark, but my
torch found the light switch right away. I pressed
it and looked around.

The bay was perhaps a hundred feet long. Stacked
in nearly empty racks on both sides were three or
four dozen screwed pipes almost as long as the bay
itself. Round each pipe, near the end, were deep
gouge marks as if some heavy metal claws had
bitten into it. Sections of the drill pipe. And nothing
else. I switched off the light, went out, pulled shut
the door and felt a heavy hand on my shoulder.

‘Would you be looking for something, my friend?'
It was a deep rough no-nonsense voice, as Irish as
a sprig of shamrock.

I turned slowly, but not too slowly, pulling the
lapels of my coat together with both hands as if
to ward off the wind and the thin cold rain that
was beginning to sift across the deck, glittering
palely through the beams of the arc-lamps then
vanishing into the darkness again. He was a short
stocky man, middle-aged, with a battered face that
could be kindly or truculent as the needs of the
moment demanded. At that moment, the balance
of expression was tipped on the side of truculence.
But not much. I decided to risk it.

‘As a matter of fact, I am.' Far from trying to
conceal my British accent, I exaggerated it. A
marked high-class English accent in the States
excites no suspicion other than the charitable one
that you may be slightly wrong in the head. ‘The
field foreman told me to inquire for the – ah –
roustabout foreman. Are you he?'

‘Golly!' he said. I felt that it should have been
‘begorrah' but the grammatical masterpiece had
floored him. You could see his mind clambering
on to its feet again. ‘Mr Jerrold sent you to look
for me, he?'

‘Yes, indeed. Miserable night, isn't it?' I pulled
my hat-brim lower. ‘I certainly don't envy you
fellows –'

‘If you was looking for me,' he interrupted, ‘why
were you poking about in there?'

‘Ah, yes. Well, I could see you were busy and
as he thought he had lost it in there, I thought
perhaps I –'

‘Who had lost what where?' He breathed deeply,
patience on a monument.

‘The general. General Ruthven. His brief-case,
with very important private papers – and very
urgent. He'd been making a tour of inspection
yesterday – let me see, now, it would have been
early afternoon – when he received the dastardly
news –'

‘He what?'

‘When he heard his daughter had been kidnapped.
He went straight for his helicopter, forgetting
all about the brief-case and –'

‘I get you. Important, huh?'

‘Very. General Ruthven says he'd put it down just
inside some doorway. It's big, morocco, marked

C. C. F. in gold letters.'
‘C.C.F.? I thought you said it was the general's?'
‘The general's papers. He'd borrowed my case. I'm
Farnborough, his private confidential secretary.' It
was very long odds indeed against one of the
scores of roustabouts foremen employed by the
general knowing the real name of his secretary,
C. C. Farnborough.

‘C.C., eh?' All suspicions and truculence now
vanished. He grinned hugely. ‘Not Claude Cecil by
any chance?'

‘One of my names does happen to be Claude,' I
said quietly. ‘I don't think it's funny.'

I had read the Irishman rightly. He was instantly
contrite.

‘Sorry, Mr Farnborough. Talkin' outa turn. No
offence. Want that me and my boys help you
look?'

‘I'd be awfully obliged.'

‘If it's there we'll have it in five minutes.'

He walked away, issued orders to his gang of

men. But I had no interest in the result of the
search, my sole remaining interest lay in getting
off that platform with all speed. There would be
no brief-case there and there would be nothing
else there. The foreman's gang were sliding doors
open with the abandon of men who have nothing
to conceal. I didn't even bother glancing inside
any of the bays, the fact that doors could be
opened without unlocking and were being opened
indiscriminately in the presence of a total stranger
was proof for me that there was nothing to be
concealed. And apart from the fact that there
were far too many men there to swear to secrecy,
it stood out a mile that that genial Irishman was
not the type to get mixed up in any criminal
activities. Some people are like that, you know
it the moment you see and speak to them. The
roustabout foreman was one of those.

I could have slipped away and down the gangway
while the search was still going on but that
would have been stupid. The search for the missing
brief-case would be nothing compared to the all-out
search that would then start for C. C. Farnborough.
They might assume I had fallen over the side.
Powerful searchlights could pick up the
Matapan
in a matter of minutes. And even were I aboard
the
Matapan
I didn't want to leave the vicinity of
the rig. Not yet. And above all I didn't want the
news to get back ashore that an intruder disguised
as, or at least claiming to be, the general's secretary
had been prowling around the X 13.

What to do when the search was over? The
foreman would expect me to go back to the derrick
side, where the accommodation and offices were,
presumably to report failure of a mission to Mr
Jerrold. Once I left for there my retreat to the
gangway would be cut off. And so far it hadn't
occurred to the foreman to ask how I had arrived
aboard the rig. He was bound to know that there
had been no helicopter or boat out to the rig in
hours. Which argued the fact that I must have
been aboard for hours. And if I had been aboard
for hours why had I delayed so long in starting this
so very urgent search for the missing brief-case?

The search, as far as I could see, was over. Doors
were being banged shut and the foreman was starting
back towards me when a bulkhead phone rang.
He moved towards it. I moved into the darkest
patch of shadow I could see and buttoned my coat
right up to the neck. That, at least, wouldn't excite
suspicion: the wind was strong now, the cold rain
driving across the well-deck at an angle of almost
forty-five degrees.

The foreman hung up and crossed over to where
I was standing. ‘Sorry, Mr Farnborough, no luck.
You sure he left it here?'

‘Certain, Mr – ah –'

‘Curran. Joe Curran. Well, it's not here now.
And we can't look any more.' He hunched deeper
into his black glistening oilskin. ‘Gotta go and start
yo-yo-ing that damn pipe.'

‘Oh, yes,' I said politely.

He grinned and explained: ‘The drill. Gotta haul
it up and change it.'

‘On a night like this and in a wind like this? And
it must take some time.'

‘It takes some time. Six hours if we're lucky. That
damned drill's two and half miles straight down,
Mr Farnborough.'

I made the proper noises of astonishment instead
of the noises of relief I felt like making. Mr Curran
working on the derrick for the next six hours in
this weather would have more to worry about than
stray secretaries.

He made to go. Already his men had filed past
and climbed up a companionway to the north
platform. ‘Coming, Mr Farnborough?'

‘Not yet.' I smiled wanly. ‘I think I'll go and sit
in the shelter of the gangway for a few minutes
and work out what I'm going to tell the general.'
I had an inspiration. ‘You see, he only phoned up
about five minutes ago. You know what he's like.
Lord knows what I'm going to tell him.'

‘Yeah. It's tough.' The words meant nothing,
already his mind was on the recovery of the drill.
‘Be seein' you.'

‘Yes. Thank you.' I watched him out of sight and
two minutes later I was back aboard the rubber
dinghy: another two minutes and we had been
hauled back to the
Matapan
.

‘You have been far too long, Mr Talbot,' Captain
Zaimis scolded. His small agitated figure gave the
impression of hopping around in the darkness
although it would have taken a monkey to hop
around that pitching heaving sponge-boat without
falling overboard with the first hop. The engine
note was much louder now: not only had the
skipper been forced to increase engine revolutions
to keep a certain amount of slack on the rope tying
the
Matapan
to the pillar, but the vessel was now
pitching so wildly that almost every time the bows
plunged deep into the sea the underwater exhaust
beneath the stern came clear in a brief but carrying
crackle of sound.