Six o’clock was an hour past the top of the tide, and we had to clear the harbour-entrance sand bar by then or wait another ten hours. “I think so, sir,” and then, to take his mind off his troubles, and also because I was curious, I asked, “What are in those crates? Motorcars?”
“Motorcars? Are you mad?” His cold blue eye swept over the whitewashed jumble of the little town and the dark green of the steeply rising forested hills behind. “This lot couldn’t build a rabbit hutch for export, far less a motorcar. Machinery. So the bills of lading say. Dynamos, generators, refrigerating, air-conditioning, and refuelling machinery. For New York.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” I said, carefully, “That the Generalissimo, having successfully completed the confiscation of all the American sugar-refining mills, is now dismantling them and selling the machinery back to the Americans? Barefaced theft like that?”
“Jetty larceny on the part of the individual is theft,” Captain Bullen said morosely. “When governments engage in grand larceny, it’s economics. But, it’ll be all perfectly legal, I’ve no doubt, but it still doesn’t make me feel less of a contraband runner. But if we don’t do it, someone else will. And the freight rate’s double the normal.”
“Which makes the Generalissimo and his government pretty desperate for money?”
“What do you think?” Bullen growled. “No one knows how many were killed in the capital and a dozen other towns in Tuesday’s hunger riots. Jamaican authorities reckon the number in hundreds. Since they turned out most foreigners and closed down or confiscated nearly all foreign businesses they haven’t been able to earn a penny abroad. The coffers of the revolution are as empty as a drum. Ban’s completely desperate for money.” He turned away and stood staring over the harbour, big hands wide-spaced on the guardrail, his back ramrod-stiff. He seemed in no hurry to go-and aimless loitering was no part of Captain Bullen’s life. He was always in a hurry. I recognised the signs; after three years of sailing with him, it would have been impossible not to. There was something he wanted to say; there was some steam he wanted to blow off, and no better outlet than that tried and trusty relief valve, Chief Officer Carter. Only whenever he wished to blow off steam it was a matter of personal pride with him never to bring up the matter himself.
It was no great trick to guess what was troubling him, so I obliged. I said, conversationally, “The cables we sent to London, sir.” They had been sent by the captain himself, but the “we” would spread the load if things had gone wrong, as they almost certainly had. “Any reply to them yet?”
“Just ten minutes ago.” he turned round casually as if the matter had really slipped his memory, but the slight purpling tinge in the red face betrayed him, and there was nothing casual about his voice when he went on: “slapped me down, Mister, that’s what they did. Slapped me down. My own company. And the Ministry of Transport. Both of them. Told me to forget about it, said my protests were completely out of order, warned me of the consequences of future lack of cooperation with the appropriate authorities, whatever the hell appropriate authorities might be. Me my own company! Thirty-five years I’ve sailed with the Blue Mail Line and now… And now…” his fists clenched and his voice choked into fuming silence.
“So there was someone bringing very heavy pressure to bear, after all,” I murmured.
“There was, Mister, there was.” the cold blue eyes were very cold indeed and the big hands opened wide, then closed, tight, till the ivory showed. Bullen was a captain, but he was more than that: he was the Commodore of the Blue Mail Fleet, and even the board of directors walk softly when the fleet commodore is around; at least they don’t treat him like an office boy. He went on softly: “if ever I get my hands on Dr. Slingsby Caroline, I’ll break his bloody neck.” Captain Bullen would have loved to get his hands on the oddly named Dr. Slingsby Caroline. Tens of thousands of police, government agents, and American service men engaged in the hunt for him would also have loved to get their hands on him. So would millions of ordinary citizens if for no other reason than the excellent one that there was a reward of $50,000 for information leading to his capture.
But the interest of Captain Bullen and the crew of the Campari was even more personal: the missing man was very much the root of all our troubles. Dr. Slingsby Caroline had vanished, appropriately enough, in South Carolina. He had worked at a U. S. government’s very hush-hush weapons research establishment south of the town of Columbia, an establishment concerned with the evolving, as had only become known in the past week or so, of some sort of small fission weapon for use by either fighter planes or mobile rocket launchers in local tactical nuclear wars. As nuclear weapons went, it was the eeriest bagatelle compared to the five megaton monsters already developed by both the United States and Russia, developing barely one-thousandth of the explosive power of those and hardly capable of devastating more than a square mile of territory. Still, with the explosive potential of five thousand tons of T.N.T., it was no toy.
Then, one day night, to be precise, Dr. Slingsby Caroline had vanished. As he was the director of the research establishment, this was serious enough, but what was even more dismaying was that he had taken the working prototype with him. He had apparently been surprised by two of the night guards at the plant and had killed them both, presumably with a silenced weapon, since no one heard or suspected anything amiss. He had driven through the plant gates about ten o’clock at night at the wheel of his own blue Chevrolet station wagon; the guards at the gate, recognising both the car and their own chief and knowing that he habitually worked until a late hour, had waved him on without a second glance. And that was the last anyone had ever seen of Dr. Caroline or the Twister, as the weapon, for some obscure reason, had been named. But it wasn’t the last that was seen of the blue Chevrolet. That had been discovered abandoned outside the Port of Savannah, some nine hours after the crime had been committed, but less than an hour after it had been discovered, which showed pretty smart police work on someone’s part. And it had been just our evil luck that the S.S. Campari had called in at Savannah on the afternoon of the day the crime had been committed. Within an hour of the discovery of the two dead guards in the research establishment, all interstate and foreign air and sea traffic in the south-eastern United States had been halted. As from seven o’clock in the morning all planes were grounded until they had been rigorously searched; as from seven o’clock police stopped and examined every truck crossing a state border; and, of course, everything larger than a rowing boat was forbidden to put out to sea. Unfortunately for the authorities in general and us in particular, the S.S. Campari had sailed from Savannah at six o’clock that morning.
Automatically the Campari became very, very “hot,” the number one suspect for the getaway. The First radio call came through at 8.30 A.M. Would Captain Bullen return immediately to Savannah? The captain, no beater about the bush, asked why the hell he should. He was told that it was desperately urgent that he return at once. Not, replied the captain, unless they gave him a very compelling reason indeed. They refused to give him a reason and Captain Bullen refused to return. Deadlock. Then, because they hadn’t much option, the federal authorities, who had already taken over from the state, gave him the facts. Captain Bullen asked for more facts. He asked for a description of the missing scientist and weapon, and he’d soon find out for himself whether or not they were on board. Followed a fifteen-minute delay, no doubt necessary to secure the release of top classified information, then the descriptions were reluctantly given. There was a curious similarity between the two descriptions. Both the Twister and Dr. Caroline were exactly seventy-five inches in length. Both were very thin, the weapon being only eleven inches in diameter. The doctor weighed 180 pounds, the Twister 280. The Twister was covered in a one piece sheath of polished anodised aluminium, the Doctor in a two-piece grey gabardine. The Twister’s head was covered by a grey pyroceram nose cap, the doctor’s by black hair with a telltale lock of grey in the centre. The orders for the Doctor were to identify and apprehend, for the Twister to identify but do not, repeat, do not touch. The weapon should be completely stable and safe, and normally it would take one of the only two experts who were as yet sufficiently acquainted with it at least ten minutes to arm it; but no one could guess what effect might have been had upon the Twister’s delicate mechanism by the jolting it might have suffered in transit. Three hours later Captain Bullen was able to report with complete certainty that neither the missing scientist nor weapon was aboard. Intensive would be a poor word to describe that search; every square foot between the chain locker and steering compartment was searched and searched again. Captain Bullen had radioed the federal authorities and then forgotten about it, or would have forgotten about it were it not that twice in the following two nights our radarscope had shown a mysterious vessel, without navigation lights, closing up from astern, then vanishing before dawn. And then we arrived at our most southerly port of call, Kingston, in Jamaica. And in Kingston the blow had fallen. We had no sooner arrived than the harbour authorities had come on board requesting that a search party from the American destroyer lying almost alongside be allowed to examine the Campari. Our friend on the radarscope, without a doubt. The search party, about forty of them, was already lined up on the deck of the destroyer. They were still there four hours later. Captain Bullen, in a few simple, well-chosen words that had carried far and clear over the sunlit waters of Kingston harbour, had told the authorities that if the United States Navy proposed, in broad daylight, to board a British mercantile marine vessel in a British harbour, then they were welcome to try. They were also welcome, he had added, to suffer, apart from the injuries and the loss of blood they would incur in the process, the very heavy penalties which would be imposed by an international court of maritime law arising from charges ranging from assault, through piracy, to an act of war, which maritime court, Captain Bullen had added pointedly, had its seat, not in Washington, D.C., but in the Hague, Holland. This stopped them cold. The authorities withdrew to consult with the Americans. Coded cables, we learnt later, were exchanged with Washington and London. Captain Bullen remained adamant. Our passengers, 90 per cent of them Americans, gave him their enthusiastic support. Messages were received from both the company head office and the Ministry of Transport requiring Captain Bullen to co-operate with the United States Navy. Pressure was being brought to bear. Bullen tore the messages up, seized the offer of the local Marconi agent to give the radio equipment an overdue check-up as a heaven-sent excuse to take the wireless officers off watch, and told the quartermaster at the gangway to accept no more messages. And so it had continued for all of thirty hours. And, because troubles never come singly, it was on the morning following our arrival that the Harrisons and Curtises, related families who occupied the forward two suites on “a” deck, received cables with the shocking news that members of both families had been fatally involved in a car crash and left that afternoon. Black gloom hung heavy over the Campari.