Puppet on a Chain (20 page)

I don't think I could have stayed below for even a few seconds longer without swallowing water. As it was, when I broke surface it took considerable restraint and will-power to prevent me from drawing in a great lungful of air with a whoop that could have been heard half-way across the harbour, but in certain circumstances, such as when your life depends on it, one can exercise a very considerable amount of will-power indeed and I made do with several large but silent gulps of air.

At first I could see nothing at all, but this was just because of the oily film on the surface of the water that had momentarily glued my eyelids together. I cleared this but still there wasn't much to see, just the dark hull of the barge I was hiding behind, the main gangway in front of me, and another parallel barge about ten feet distant. I could hear voices, a soft murmuring of voices. I swam silently to the stern of the barge, steadied myself by the rudder and peered cautiously round the stern. Two men, one with a torch, were standing on the gangway peering down at the spot where I had so recently disappeared: the waters were satisfactorily dark and still.

The two men straightened. One of them shrugged and made a gesture with the palms of both hands held upwards: the second man nodded agreement and rubbed his leg tenderly. The first man lifted his arms and crossed them above his head twice, first to his left, then to his right. Just as he did so there was a staccato and spluttering coughing sound as a marine diesel, somewhere very close indeed, started up. It was obvious that neither of the two men cared very much for this new development, for the man who had made the signal at once grabbed the arm of the other and led him away, hobbling badly, at the best speed he could muster.

I hauled myself aboard the barge, which sounds a very simple exercise indeed, but when a sheer-sided bull is four feet clear of the water this simple exercise can turn out to be a near-impossibility and so it turned out for me. I made it eventually with the aid of the stern-rope, flopped over the gunwale and lay there for a full half minute, gasping away like a stranded whale, before a combination of the beginnings of recovery from complete exhaustion and a mounting sense of urgency had me on my feet again and heading towards the barge's bows and the main gangway.

The two men who had been so lately bent on my destruction and were now no doubt full of that righteous glow which comes from the satisfaction of a worthwhile job well done were now no more than two vaguely discerned shadows disappearing into the even deeper shadows of the storage sheds on shore. I pulled myself on to the gangway and crouched there for a moment until I had located the source of the diesel, then stooped, ran,quickly along the gangway till I came to the place where the barge was secured to a side gangway, first dropping to my hands and knees, then inching along on knees and elbows before peering over the edge of the gangway.

The barge was at least seventy feet in length, broad in proportion and as totally lacking in grace of design as it was possible to be. The for'ard three quarters of the barge was given up entirely to battened holds, then after that came the wheelhouse and, right aft and joined to the wheelhouse, the crew accommodation. Yellow lights shone through the curtained windows. A large man in a dark peaked cap was leaning out of a wheelhouse window talking to a crew member who was about to clamber on to the side gangway to cast off.

The stern of the barge was hard against the main gangway on which I was lying. I waited till the crew member had climbed on to the side gangway and was walking away to cast off for'ard, then slithered down soundlessly on to the stern of the barge and crouched low behind the cabin until I heard the sound of ropes being thrown aboard and the hollow thump of feet on wood as the man jumped down from the side gangway. I moved silently for'ard until I came to an iron ladder fitted to the fore end of the cabin, climbed up this and edged for'ard in a prone position till I was stretched flat on the stepped wheelhouse roof. The navigation lights came on but this was no worry: they were so positioned on either side of the wheelhouse roof that they had the comforting effect of throwing the position in which I lay into comparatively deeper shadow.

The engine note deepened and the side gangway slowly dropped astern. I wondered bleakly if I had stepped from the frying-pan into the fire.

CHAPTER TEN

I had been pretty certain that I would be putting out to sea that night and anyone who did that under the conditions I expected to experience should also have catered for the possibility of becoming very wet indeed; if I had used even a modicum of forethought in that respect I should have come along fully fitted out with a waterproof scuba suit: but the thought of a waterproof scuba suit had never even crossed my mind and I had no alternative now but to lie where I was and pay the price for my negligence.

I felt as if I were rapidly freezing to death. The night wind out in the Zuider Zee was bitter enough to have chilled even a warmly clad man who was forced to lie motionless, and I wasn't warmly clad. I was soaked to the skin with sea-water and that chilling wind had the effect of making me feel that I had turned into a block of ice -- with the difference that a block of ice is inert while I shivered continuously like a man with black-water fever. The only consolation was that I didn't give a damn if it rained: I couldn't possibly become any wetter than I was already.

With numbed and frozen fingers that wouldn't stay steady I unzipped my jacket pockets, took both the gun and the remaining magazine from their waterproof coverings, loaded the gun and stuck it inside my canvas coat. I wondered idly what would happen if, in an emergency, I found that my trigger finger had frozen solid, so I pushed my right hand inside my sodden jacket. The only effect this had was to make my hand feel colder than ever, so I took it out again.

The lights of Amsterdam were dropping far behind now and we were well out into the Zuider Zee. The barge, I noticed, seemed to be following the same widely curving course as the Marianne had done when she had come into harbour at noon on the previous day. It passed very close indeed to a couple of buoys and, looking over the bows, it seemed to me as if it was on a collision course with a third buoy about four hundred yards ahead. But I didn't doubt for a minute that the barge skipper knew just exactly what he was doing.

The engine note dropped as the revolutions dropped and two men emerged on deck from the cabin -- the first crew to appear outside since we'd cleared the barge harbour. I tried to press myself even closer to the wheelhouse roof, but they didn't come my way, they headed towards the stern. I twisted round the better to observe them.

One of the men carried a metal bar to which was attached a rope at either end. The two men, one on either side of the poop, paid out a little of their lines until the bar must have been very close to water level. I twisted and looked ahead. The barge, moving very slowly now, was no more than twenty yards distant from the flashing buoy and on a course that would take it within twenty feet of it. I heard a sharp word of command from the wheelhouse, looked aft again and saw that the two men were beginning to let the lines slip through their fingers, one man counting as he did so. The reason for the counting was easy to guess. Although I couldn't see any in the gloom, the ropes must have been knotted at regular intervals to enable the two men who were paying them out to keep the iron bar at right angles to the barge's passage through the water.

The barge was exactly abreast the buoy when one of the men called out softly and at once, slowly but steadily, they began to haul their lines inboard. I knew now what was going to happen but I watched pretty closely all the same. As the two men continued to pull, a two-foot cylindrical buoy bobbed clear of the water. This was followed by a four-bladed grapnel, one of the flukes of which was hooked round the metal bar. Attached to this grapnel was a rope. The buoy, grapnel and metal bar were hauled aboard, then the two men began to pull on the grapnel rope until eventually an object came clear of the water and was brought inboard. The object was a grey, metal-banded metal box, about eighteen inches square and twelve deep. It was taken immediately inside the cabin, but even before this was done the barge was under full power again and the buoy beginning to drop rapidly astern. The entire operation had been performed with the ease and surety which bespoke a considerable familiarity with the technique just employed.

Time passed, and a very cold, shivering and miserable time it was too. I thought it was impossible for me to become any colder and wetter than I was but I was wrong, for about four in the morning the sky darkened and it began to rain and I had never felt rain so cold. By this time what little was left of my body heat had managed partially to dry off some of the inner layers of clothing, but from the waist down -- the canvas jacket provided reasonable protection -- it just proved to have been a waste of time. I hoped that when the time came that I had to move and take to the water again I wouldn't have reached that state of numbed paralysis where all I could do was sink.

The first light of the false dawn was in the sky now and I could vaguely distinguish the blurred outlines of land to the south and east. Then it became darker again and for a time I could see nothing, and then the true dawn began to spread palely from the east and I could see land once more and gradually came to the conclusion that we were fairly close in to the north shore of Huyler and about to curve away to the south-west and then south towards the island's little harbour.

I had never appreciated that those damned barges moved so slowly. As far as the coastline of Huyler was concerned, the barge seemed to be standing still in the water. The last thing I wished to happen was to approach the Huyler shore in broad daylight and give rise to comment on the part of the inevitable ship-watchers as to why a crew member should be so eccentric as to prefer the cold roof of the wheelhouse to the warmth inside. I thought of the warmth inside and put the thought out of my mind.

The sun appeared over the far shore of the Zuider Zee but it was no good to me, it was one of those peculiar suns that were no good at drying out clothes and after a little I was glad to see that it was one of those early-morning suns that promised only to deceive, for it was quickly overspread by a pall of dark cloud and soon that slanting freezing rain was hard at work again, stopping what little circulation I had left. I was glad because the cloud had the effect of darkening the atmosphere again and the rain might persuade the harbour rubber-neckers to stay at home.

We were coming towards journey's end. The rain, now mercifully, had strengthened to the extent where it was beginning to hurt my exposed face and hands and was hissing whitely into the sea: visibility was down to only a couple of hundred yards and although I could see the end of the row of navigation marks towards which the barge was now curving, I couldn't see the harbour beyond.

I wrapped the gun up in its waterproof cover and jammed it in its holster. It would have been safer, as I'd done previously, to have put it in the zipped pocket of my canvas jacket, but I wasn't going to take the canvas jacket with me. At least, not far: I was so numbed and weakened by the long night's experience that the cramping and confining effects of that cumbersome jacket could have made all the difference between my reaching shore or not: another thing I'd carelessly forgotten to take with me was an inflatable life-jacket or belt.

I wriggled out of the canvas jacket and balled it up under my arm. The wind suddenly felt a good deal icier than ever but the time for worrying about that was gone. I slithered along the wheelhouse roof, slid silently down the ladder, crawled below the level of the now uncurtained cabin windows, glanced quickly for'ard -- an unnecessary precaution, no one in his right mind would have been out on deck at that moment unless he had to -- dropped the canvas jacket overboard, swung across the stern-quarter, lowered myself to the full length of my arms, checked that the screw was well clear of my vicinity, and let go.

It was warmer in the sea than it had been on the wheelhouse roof, which was as well for me as I felt myself to be almost frighteningly weak. It had been my intention to tread water until the barge had entered harbour, or at least, under these prevailing conditions, it had disappeared into the murk of the rain, but if ever there was a time for dispensing with refinements this was it. My primary concern, my only concern at the moment, was survival. I ploughed on after the fast receding stern of the barge with the best speed I could muster.

It was a swim, not more than ten minutes in duration, that any six-year-old in good training could have accomplished with ease, but I was way below that standard that morning, and though I can't claim it was a matter of touch and go, I couldn't possibly have done it a second time. When I could clearly see the harbour wall I sheered off from the navigation marks, leaving them to my right, and finally made shore.

I sloshed my way up the beach and, as if by a signal, the rain suddenly stopped. Cautiously, I made my way up the slight eminence of earth before me, the top of which was level with the top of the harbour wall, stretched myself flat on the soaking ground and cautiously lifted my head.

Immediately to the right of me were the two tiny rectangular harbours of Huyler, the outer leading by a narrow passage to the inner. Beyond the inner harbour lay the pretty picture-postcard village of Huyler itself, which, with the exception of the one long and two short straight streets lining the inner harbour itself, was a charming maze of twisting roads and a crazy conglomeration of, mainly, green and white painted houses mounted on stilts as a precaution against flood-water. The stilts were walled in for use as cellars, the entrance to the houses being by outside wooden stairs to the first floor.

I returned my attention to the outer harbour. The barge was berthed alongside its inner wall and the unloading of the cargo was already busily under way. Two small shore derricks lifted a succession of crates and sacks from the unbattened holds, but I had no interest in those crates and sacks, which were certainly perfectly legitimate cargo, but in the small metal box that had been picked up from the sea and which I was equally certain was the most illegitimate cargo imaginable. So I let the legitimate cargo look after itself and concentrated my attention on the cabin of the barge. I hoped to God I wasn't already too late, although I could hardly see how I could have been.