The Saint in Miami s-22 Page 20

  Impulsively he reached out for her hand, "Karen," he said, "why didn't you tell me?"

  "How could I?" But her face and voice were without rancour. "I wouldn't have been any more use if I'd been suspected. I'd put too much into getting where I was. Even for you, I couldn't endanger any of it. I knew you were supposed to be a sort of romantic Robin Hood, but how could I know how much of that was to be trusted? I couldn't take a chance. Until now-I've got to."

  "Finish it now," he said quietly.

  She put her cigarette back to her lips and drew at it more evenly than she had done since he lighted it. It was as though a die had been cast and a decision made, and now for the first time she could rest a little while and let herself go with the tide.

  "It started as a very ordinary assignment," she said. "The Foreign Office knew about Randolph March, as they know about most people who might give them trouble one day. They knew he'd spent a lot of time in Germany since 1933, and had a lot of powerful Nazi friends, and a lot of leanings towards their point of view. But he isn't the first rich man who's thought the Nazi system might be a good thing. You know the technique-you scare a rich man into the Fascist camp with the bogey of Communism, because he's worried about his possessions, and you scare the poor man into the Communist camp with the bogey of capitalism; and then the Communists and the fascists make an alliance and clean up . . . Well, after Czechoslovakia, they found out that March was doing some heavy speculation in Nazi bonds."

  "Through the Foreign Investment Pool?"

  She nodded.

  "So when the real war started, he was somebody to be watched. It was more or less routine at first-until I found out about Friede. Of course, I had to pretend that I had Nazi sympathies myself, but it was a long time before they'd open up at all. Even then, they never let me get near anything im­portant-most of what I did find out was from listening at keyholes. Until last night . . . But before that, I'd heard the word 'submarine' once. I suppose I'd worked out the tanker business more or less the way you did. But if that was the scheme, I had to find the submarine base. That's why I went with them last night because it seemed almost certain that they'd be going there. I was right. So as soon as I knew all I had to know, I slipped away. That was this morning ... I saw from the map that the road couldn't be very far away, and I'd have made it by now if those wild pigs hadn't attacked me."

  The Saint thought back over the country they had traversed, and smiled rather grimly.

  "I don't suppose they've even bothered to try and catch you," he said. Because they know better. We've been pushing this wall-eyed wheelbarrow through the swamp for about fourteen hours with an Indian guide who has X-ray eyes; and we haven't arrived yet"

  "But I've got to get out!" she said desperately. "You can take me. I can identify myself to the British Ambassador in Washington. I've only got to get to a telephone. He'll drop a word to the State Department, and in half an hour the Navy and the Coastguard will be here."

  "Looking for a most illegal German submarine base," said the Saint. "But not particularly interested in a couple of friends of mine."

  She stared at him almost incredulously.

  "Are you still thinking about them?"

  "It's a weakness of mine," he said.

  She sat still.

  Then she let the stub of her cigarette fall carefully into the stream. She reached out and took his own cigarette-case out of his pocket, and helped herself to another. She waited until he gave her a match.

  She said: "For three months I've let myself be pawed by Randolph March and leered at by Heinrich Friede. I've pretended to sympathise with a philosophy that stinks to high heaven. I've let myself gloat over the invasion of peaceful countries and the bombing of helpless women and children and the enslaving of one nation after another. I've made myself laugh at the slaughter of my own people and the plundering of Jews and the torture of concentration camps. I've even let you walk blindly into what might have been your death, while all my heart loved you, because I'm not big enough to decide who is to live and who is to die while the civilisation that made us is trying to save all the lights in the world from going out. And all you can think of is your friends!"

  Simon Templar gazed at her with clear eyes of bitter blue.

  For a long time. While the intensely even tones of her voice seemed to hang in the sultry air and beat back savagely into his brain.

  Lake an automaton, he lighted the fresh cigarette he had taken, and put his cigarette-case away. In the infinite silence, every scintilla of feeling seemed to empty out of his face, leaving nothing but a fine-drawn shell that was as readable as graven stone.

  The mask turned towards Hoppy Uniatz.

  "Do you think you could drive this thing?"

  "Sure, boss," said Mr Uniatz expansively. "I loin it on de farm at de reform school."

  The Saint's eyebrows barely moved.

  "Of course, you wouldn't have thought of volunteering before." His accent was amazingly limpid and precise. "Will you take it back the way Charlie Halwuk tells you?" He turned to the motionless Indian. "Which way is where we were going, Charlie?"

  The Seminole raised a mahogany arm.

  "Plenty straight into sun. No can miss now."

  Simon stood up, and caught a bough over his head, and swung himself swiftly on to the quivering shore.

  "Thanks-Karen," he said.

  Her lips were white.

  "What are you doing?" she asked shakily.

  His smile was suddenly gay and careless again.

  "You've got enough men to look after you, darling. I'm going to see if I can find Patricia and Peter before the Navy gets there. Give my love to the Ambassador." He waved his hand. "On your way, Hoppy-and take care of them."

  "Okay, boss," said Mr Uniatz valiantly.

  He hauled back on the clutch levers. The giant wheels made a quarter turn, and stalled. Hoppy started the engine again and raced it up. Too late, the Saint saw what had hap­pened. A log that had drifted down while they were talking had nosed in between the back wheels and embedded itself in the soft bank of the stream. But by the time he saw it, he could do nothing. Never a man to waste time on niggling finesse, Mr Uniatz had slammed the clutches home while the engine roared at full throttle. There was a deafening screech of rending metal, and every moving part came to a shuddering standstill with an unmistakably irrevocable kind of finality.

  Mr Uniatz pumped homicidally at the starter, and suc­ceeded in producing a slow spark and a soft puff of expiring smoke.

  "Let it rest," said the Saint wearily, and glanced at Karen again. "I did my best, darling, but I think Fate had other ideas."

  3 "I'll have to go on on foot," said the girl. "The way I started. If I had a guide-"

  "What about it, Charlie?' Simon interrupted. The Seminole shook his head impassively.

  "Indian go. Maybe three-four days. White man no can do. White man die plenty quick."

  Karen Leith covered her eyes, just for a moment.

  The Saint touched her shoulder.

  "We may be able to steal a boat and get you out through the islands," he said. "But we've got to get to the base first. And we've got to step on it"

  Without the bright beams of the marsh buggy to light the way, an attempt to get through the trackless Everglades at night was hopeless and might well be fatal. And there was not much more time. Florida twilights were short, and dark­ness would drop like spilled ink as soon as the sun was gone.

  Simon stood up.

  "Charlie, you lead. We've got to make Lostman's River be­fore dark. Travel fast, but be as quiet as you can."

  The Indian nodded and got out. The ground quivered badly under Simon, but Charlie Halwuk's moccasined feet seemed to possess some native buoyancy that prevented them from sinking.

  Karen spoke to him with tormented calm.

  "You'd better keep your eyes open, too. There may be a party out looking for me, in spite of what he said."

  "If man come, I hear," stated Charlie Halwuk.
>
  He parted branches and moved on. The procession formed behind him.

  The Indian's course was deceptively casual to watch, but it was like trying to follow the course of a dodging jackrabbit. He ducked under vines, found passage through tight-packed foliage, and used roots and tufts of grass as stepping-stones with the sure-footedness of a mountain goat. Behind Simon and the girl, Gallipolis began a whispering flow of his inex­haustible Greek profanities. Bringing up the rear, Hoppy Un­iatz, who in spite of his nickname had never had any practice in the art of agile skipping about on treacherous knolls, ut­tered occasional louder epithets as he floundered along.

  Presently they came to another narrow stream.

  "Cross here," said Charlie Halwuk, and forded out into the knee-deep water.

  The others waded after him. They were nearly across to the opposite bank when Simon noticed that the densest of hammocks screened the shore to bar their way. The Indian slipped sideways along it, working upstream. Then he held up his hand, stopped for a moment, and returned to Simon.

  "Go down other way," he said imperturbably. "Crocodile up there. Make bad to get out."

  "Crocodiles!" The girl's fingers tightened on Simon's arm, and he knew she was thinking of her own crossing of that same brackish water some time before. "I didn't know there were any in Florida."

  "Plenty here," said Charlie.

  He moved on noiselessly through the water, found a clump of bushes which looked no different to Simon than the rest, and pushed them aside like a gateway on to the shore. The Saint climbed after him into a cavernous cathedral dank with dripping Spanish moss and roofed with a lacework of twisted branches, so dark that it gave the illusion that night had al­ready fallen. They went on.

  The journey became a nightmare race against fleeting time, with every obstacle that the most prolific combination of soil and moisture could erect to impede them. Gallipolis kept up his blasphemous monotone; but Mr. Uniatz, whose chassis had been designed for weight-lifting rather than cross­country running, was reduced to an asthmatic grunting. And always the Indian ahead was a tireless space-eating will-o'-the-wisp that kept just a few yards in the lead but could never be overtaken, even though the ground grew firmer at last and the thorny scrub began to thin out. Karen stumbled against the Saint, and for a while his arm held her up; but presently she pulled herself free and fought on indomitably at his side again.

  And then, at last, Charlie Halwuk stopped and looked back. Simon caught up with him, and found himself gazing through a last thin screen of vines into the pinkish afterglow of the vanished sun. A breeze stirred, wrinkling water that lay in a wide roseate pool. The Indian pointed.

  "Lostman's River," he said.

  Simon stared at it while the shadows deepened perceptibly, Karen Leith came up beside him and clung to his arm, but he scarcely noticed her. He was feeling an absurd weak­ness that foreran a new flood of strength as he let himself bathe in the mad magnificent knowledge that they had made it, in spite of everything. They were there.

  This was the secret outpost of the conspiracy, the field headquarters of March and Friede. He took it in.

  The March Hare was there, riding at anchor in the broad pool, a slash of pastel grey across the river with porthole lights beginning to reflect themselves in the darkening water like orderly ranks of stars. Between it and the shore was moored a whale-backed shape of a deeper and more glossy grey, most of it hardly breaking the surface, but with its periscope and conning tower outlined in sharp silhouette against the sheen of the pool.

  To his right, a small dock shaped like a slender capital T pointed from the water into the shore, at a place where a group of corrugated-iron buildings, probably storehouses, clustered around a huge aluminum-painted fuel storage tank. Tied up to the dock was a small open motorboat, rubbing gently against the piling in the river current. A little further on, another long low building broke the dusk with two yellow lighted windows, but even they were not much more than a hundred yards from where he stood.

  On his other side, Hoppy breathed heavily and drained the last drops from the bottle he had brought with him from the abandoned marsh buggy, and dumped it into the under­growth. Its extinction hardly seemed to reach his attention under the stress of the awe-inspiring realisation that was silt­ing up in the small hollow space inside his head.

  "Boss," Mr Uniatz said reverently, "is dis de Pool?"

  "This is it," said the Saint.

  "Boss-" Mr Uniatz wriggled with the brontosaurian stir­ring of an almost unconquerable eagerness. "Can I try it?"

  "No," Simon said ruthlessly. "You stay here with everybody else. I'm going ahead to reconnoitre. The rest of you keep quiet and don't move until I give you a signal. Gallipolis, let's have your flashlight. When I "blink it this way, come after me."

  He pressed Karen's hand for a moment as he released him­self from her arm. Then he was gone.

  He stayed just within the edge of the jungle, for the river bank had been cleared for some distance around the lodge. Mud sucked at his boots, and more mosquitoes found him to make a buzzing and stinging hell out of every step; but al­ready with his natural instinct for the wilds he was learning the tricks of movement in that new kind of country, and he felt a boyish land of excitement at the awareness of his increasing skill.

  He waded through a narrow winding arm of the river that crossed his path, circumnavigating another evil cottonrnouth that curled like an almost indiscernible sentinel in a clump of lilies; and then he was almost directly behind the lodge. The river broadened in front of the building, arching out towards the Gulf in a sheltering bay. There was more dark formidable land on the other side, it's coastline dimly broken by other tortuous creeks that carried the drainage of the Everglades out to sea; and he had to admit that the submarine base had been chosen with a master tactician's eye. Without knowing every secret marker of the channel that had been dredged to it, no one could have found it by water in anything larger than a skiff; and even then only a Seminole pilot would be likely to escape getting lost among the myriad islands and shoals that still lay between it and the sea.

  Silently as a roaming panther, Simon stepped out of the sheltering jungle and crossed the clearing towards the blacker shadow under the wall of the lodge, where one of the lighted windows was like a square hole in the darkness striped with narrow black lines. As he reached it he saw that they were bars, and his pulses gained a beat in the rate of their steady rhythm. But a curtain inside made it impossible to see through.

  He shifted towards the corner which might bring him round to a door.

  An owl hooted mournfully in the thickets behind him, where the shrill chorus of innumerable insects made a back­ground din above which one might have been tempted to believe that no slight sound could have been heard. And yet as Simon turned the corner he did hear a different sound-a sharp rustle that jerked his muscles into involuntary tension like the warning trill of a rattlesnake.

  Then he saw that it was not a snake, but a man who had stepped out of the shadow of the doorway.

  They stared at each other for an instant in the stillness of surprise.

  Out there in the open, there was just enough relief from the darkness for Simon to see him. He was a huge crop-headed bull-necked man in dirty ducks, naked to the waist, with a boiler chest matted with thick hair. A revolver hung in a holster at his hip, and one of his great hands grabbed for it while the other reached for the Saint.

  He was too slow with both moves.

  The Saint leaped at him a fraction of a second sooner. It was no time for drawing-room niceties, and Simon was not in the mood to take chances with a gorilla of that build. As he went in, his left knee led for the groin while his fist simulta­neously pistoned into the vital plexus just under the parting of the ribs. It was like punching a pad of solid rubber; but the man buckled with agony, and then Simon had him. He had him on the ground and he had the massive arms pin­ioned in a leg scissors, and because he dared not risk another gasp he had his hands l
ocked on the brawny neck and his thumbs crushing mercilessly into the man's windpipe. And after a little while something seemed to give way, and the guard was quite still.

  Simon got up and rolled him back into the thickest shadow. He listened for a few seconds, and could hear nothing but the insect and owl concerto. Satisfied that the scuffle had raised no alarm, he tried the door that the man had stepped away from. It was locked, but a search of the guard's pockets produced a key that fitted. Knowing then that he must be very near the end of his original quest, Simon turned the lock and confidently went in.

  He found himself in a small barely furnished room lighted with a single dim hanging bulb. The room was stifling. A slim brown-haired girl lay on an iron cot with her face buried in the pillow. She started up as the Saint came in, showing him brown eyes made dull with fear and hopelessness, set in the face of a wayward Madonna. A frail grey-haired man sitting in a cheap wooden chair beside the cot raised a haggard unshaven face and made a protective movement towards her with one thin arm.

  "What is it now?" he asked tiredly, and tried ineffectually to stiffen the gaze of his weak eyes.

  Simon looked at him with triumph and bitterness and pity blending in his long comprehensive glance.

  "Lawrence Gilbeck, I presume," he said unoriginally. "I'm Simon Templar. I believe Justine sent for me."

  4 The flare of half-incredulous relief that leaped into the girl's eyes died again slowly into a more hopeless despair.

  "So you came," she said in a low voice. "And I got you into this-you and Pat. Now you'll die here with us."

  "It's no use," echoed Gilbeck stupidly. "Justine told me; but you shouldn't have come. You don't know what you're up against. There isn't anything you can do."

  "That remains to be seen," said the Saint grimly.

  He switched out the light, and presently found his way to the dim glow of the window. Pulling the curtains aside, he aimed his flashlight through the screen in the direction of where he had left the rest of his party, and blinked it three times. The flashes could hardly have been seen from the March Hare. He dropped the curtains back and spoke quietly into the dark.