The Khufra Run. Jack Higgins
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have helped, so I did the obvious thing and got the hell out of there.
When I got back to Tijola, I stopped at the beach bar and had a large glass of the local brandy, a brew calculated to take the skin off your lips if you were injudicious enough to allow it to touch them. There was a light in the cottage window which didn’t surprise me for at that time Turk was in the habit of turning up most nights.
I found him sprawled across the table, out to the wide. The eye balls were retracted, but his pulse was steady enough. Heroin and Spanish Brandy. I wondered how much longer his system was going to be able to take it as I carried him across to the bed.
I covered him with a blanket, turned to go back to the table and saw a piece of paper pinned to the door with the breadknife. We put the bird to bed for you. Mind your own business in future or next time it’s you.
God knows why I bothered, but I was running when I went out of the door. Not that it mattered because when I reached the slipway, the Otter simply wasn’t there.
Definitely not my night.
I was up at first light and drove into Ibiza where I helped myself to a couple of aqualungs and various other essential items of diving gear from the Mary Grant.
When I got back to Tijola, Turk was still out cold. I tried slapping him awake which did no good at all and when I attempted to get him on his feet he collapsed instantly, boneless as a jellyfish. It was like handling a corpse and I got him back on the bed and left him to it.
So, I was on my own again - the story of my life, or so it seemed. One thing was certain. Whatever had to be done I would have to do alone so I pulled on one of the yellow neoprene wetsuits I’d brought from the Mary Grant, buckled on an aqualung and went to it.
I tried the obvious at first and simply waded into the water from the slipway. The seabed shelved very rapidly at that point so that it was four or five fathoms deep close inshore.
The water was like black glass, giving the illusion of being quite clear and yet visibility was poor, mainly because the sun wasn’t yet out.
I went out, as I have said, in a direct line from the slip-way for perhaps fifty yards, keeping close to the bottom and didn’t see a thing. So I tried another approach and moved back towards the shore, tacking twenty yards to either side of my central line in a slow, painful zig-zag.
Which all took time - too much time. I hadn’t eaten, hadn’t even swallowed a cup of coffee which was a mistake for, in spite of the wetsuit, it was cold.
I was getting old, that was the trouble. Too old for this kind of nonsense. The cold ate into me like acid and I was gripped by a mood of savage despair. Everything I had in the world was tied up in the Otter. Without it I was nothing. On the beach once and for all and no way back.
I surfaced close to the slipway and found Turk sitting cross-legged on the beach, a blanket around his shoulders. There was a bottle of that cheap local brandy wedged in the sand between his feet and he nursed a tin cup in both hands.
‘Enjoying yourself?’ he asked.
‘The only way to live.’
He swallowed some more of that terrible brandy and nodded slightly, a curiously vacant look in his eyes. It was as if he was not really there, in spirit at least.
He said, ‘Okay, General, what’s it all about?’
So I told him. The mill at La Grande, Claire Bouvier, Redshirt and his friends - the whole bit and as I talked, the sun edged its way over the point, flooding the creek with light.
When I was finished he shook his head and sighed heavily. ‘You never did learn to mind your own business did you? Little friend of all the world.’
‘That’s me,’ I said. ‘Now let’s have your professional opinion.’
‘Simple. You’ve been looking in the wrong place. The way the currents run in this cove you should have tried the mid-channel.’
My heart, as they say, sank. ‘But it’s fifteen or sixteen fathoms in places out there.’
‘I know, General. I know.’ He smiled wearily. ‘Which is why you’re going to need papa. Give me five minutes to get into my gear. We’ll use the inflatable with the outboard and make sure there’s at least twenty fathoms of line on the anchor. We’re going to need it out there.’
I said, ‘Are you sure you feel up to this?’
‘You’ve got to be joking,’ he replied without even an attempt at a smile.
He turned and walked away with a curious kind of dignity, the blanket trailing from his shoulders like a cloak and yet there was something utterly and terrifyingly wrong. Earlier when I had attempted to waken him he had seemed like a corpse. Now the corpse walked. It was simple as that.
I was crouched in the dinghy in mid-channel taking a breather just before nine o’clock when Turk surfaced and gave me the sign. I adjusted my mouthpiece, went over the side and followed him down through around ten fathoms of smoke-grey water.
The Otter was crouched in a patch of seagrass like some strange marine monster. From a distance everything seemed perfectly normal and then, when I was close enough, I saw the holes ripped in the floats and hull.
So that was very much that and there was certainly nothing to hang around for. I followed Turk up and surfaced beside the dinghy. He spat out his mouthpiece and grinned savagely.
‘Somebody’s a handy man with a fireaxe. You certainly know how to win friends and influence people.’
I pulled myself into the dinghy, unstrapped my aqualung and started the outboard. ‘All right, so I’m splitting my sides laughing. What are the prospects?’
‘Of raising her?’ He shrugged. ‘Oh, I could do it, but I’d need to have a couple of pontoons and a steam winch and we’d need to recruit half-a-dozen locals as general labourers.’
‘How long?’
‘A month - maybe more if the weather plays us up, but whatever happens it would cost you. Four, maybe five thousand dollars and that would be cutting it to the bone, a friend for a friend.’
Which still left repairs to the floats and hull and the entire engine would have to be stripped, the control system. And add to that the airworthiness check the authorities would insist on before she flew again. God alone knows how much that would cost.
‘Is it on?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘Not in a thousand years.’
‘What about insurance?’
‘Nothing that would cover this. I could never afford the right kind of premium.’
I killed the motor as we drifted in through the shallows and we got out and pulled the dinghy up onto the beach together.
Turk picked up his aqualung. ‘This character in the red shirt and wire glasses. I’ll ask around. Somebody must know him.’
‘What good would that do?’ I said bitterly. ‘He could never pay for this.’
‘Maybe not, but you could always take it out of his hide some, after asking him politely why he did it?’
I suppose it was only then that the full extent of the catastrophe really got through to me and I kicked out at the inflatable dinghy savagely.
‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘I’d say the girl was the person to put that question to.’
‘Claire Bouvier?’
‘She didn’t want the police in on things did she? She told you it wasn’t how it looked. This creep tried to run you down in a truck and failing