Santorini. Alistair MacLean
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twelve miles away. Let me know when you locate this bandit and I’ll cut the engines.’ The spy-glass, though splendidly gimballed to deal with the worst vagaries of pitching and rolling, was quite incapable of coping with even the mildest vibration which, more often than not, produced a very fuzzy photograph indeed.
Talbot moved out on to the port wing to join the lieutenant who stood there, a tall, thin young man with fair hair, thick pebbled glasses and a permanently lugubrious expression.
‘Well, Jimmy, how do you fancy this? A maybe bandit and a sinking vessel at the same time. Should relieve the tedium of a long hot summer’s afternoon, don’t you think?’
The lieutenant looked at him without enthusiasm. Lieutenant the Lord James Denholm—Talbot called him ‘Jimmy’ for brevity’s sake—seldom waxed enthusiastic about anything.
‘I don’t fancy it at all, Captain.’ Denholm waved a languid hand. ‘Disturbs the even tenor of my ways.’
Talbot smiled. Denholm was surrounded by an almost palpable aura of aristocratic exhaustion that had disturbed and irritated Talbot in the early stage of their acquaintanceship, a feeling that had lasted for no more than half an hour. Denholm was totally unfitted to be a naval officer of any kind and his highly defective eyesight should have led to his automatic disbarment from any navy in the world. But Denholm was aboard the Ariadne not because of his many connections with the highest echelons of society—heir to an earldom, his blood was indisputably the bluest of the blue—but because, without question, he was the right man in the right place. The holder of three scientific degrees—from Oxford, UCLA and MIT, all summa cum laude—in electrical engineering and electronics, Denholm was as close to being an electronics wizard as any man could ever hope to be. Not that Denholm would have claimed to be anything of what he would have said to be the ridiculous kind. Despite his lineage and academic qualifications, Denholm was modest and retiring to a fault. This reticence extended even to the making of protests which was why, despite his feeble objections—he had been under no compulsion to go—he had been dragooned into the Navy in the first place.
He said to Talbot: ‘This bandit, Captain—if it is a bandit—what do you intend to do about it?’
‘I don’t intend to do anything about it.’
‘But if he is a bandit—well, then, he’s spying, isn’t he?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, then—’
‘What do you expect me to do, Jimmy? Bring him down? Or are you itching to try out this experimental laser gun you have with you?’
‘Heaven forfend.’ Denholm was genuinely horrified. ‘I’ve never fired a gun in anger in my life. Correction. I’ve never even fired a gun.’
‘If I wanted to bring him down a teeny-weeny heat-seeking missile would do the job very effectively. But we don’t do things like that. We’re civilized. Besides, we don’t provoke international incidents. An unwritten law.’
‘Sounds a very funny law to me.’
‘Not at all. When the United States or NATO play war games, as we are doing now, the Soviets track us very closely indeed, whether on land, sea or air. We don’t complain. We can’t. When they’re playing their game we do exactly the same to them. Can, admittedly, have its awkward moments. Not so long ago, when the US Navy were carrying out exercises in the Sea of Japan an American destroyer banged into, and quite severely damaged, a Russian submarine which was monitoring things a little too closely.’
‘And that didn’t cause what you’ve just called an international incident?’
‘Certainly not. Nobody’s fault. Mutual apologies between the two captains and the Russian was towed to a safe port by another Russian warship. Vladivostok, I believe it was.’ Talbot turned his head. ‘Excuse me. That’s the radio-room call-up.’
‘Myers again,’ the speaker said. ‘Delos. Name of the sinking vessel. Very brief message—explosion, on fire, sinking fast.’
‘Keep listening,’ Talbot said. He looked at the helmsman who already had a pair of binoculars to his eyes. ‘You have it, Harrison?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Harrison handed over the binoculars and twitched the wheel to port. ‘Fire off the port bow.’
Talbot picked it up immediately, a thin black column of smoke rising vertically, unwaveringly, into the blue and windless sky. He was just lowering his glasses when the bell rang twice again. It was O’Rourke, the weatherman, or, more officially, the senior long-range radar operator.
‘Lost him, I’m afraid. The bandit, I mean. I was looking at the vectors on either side of him to see if he had any friends and when I came back he was gone.’
‘Any ideas, Chief?’
‘Well…’ O’Rourke sounded doubtful. ‘He could have exploded but I doubt it.’
‘So do I. We’ve had the spy-glass trained on his approach bearing and they’d have picked up an explosion for sure.’
‘Then he must have gone into a steep dive. A very steep dive. God knows why. I’ll find him.’ The speaker clicked off.
Almost at once a telephone rang again. It was Van Gelder.
‘222, sir. Smoke. Plane. Could be the bandit.’
‘Almost certainly is. The weatherman’s just lost it off the long-range radar screen. Probably a waste of time but try to get that photograph anyway.’
He moved out on to the starboard wing and trained his glasses over the starboard quarter. He picked it up immediately, a heavy dark plume of smoke with, he thought, a glow of red at its centre. It was still quite high, at an altitude of four or five thousand feet. He didn’t pause to check how deeply the plane was diving or whether or not it actually was on fire. He moved quickly back into the bridge and picked up a phone.
‘Sub-Lieutenant Cousteau. Quickly.’ A brief pause. ‘Henri? Captain. Emergency. Have the launch and the lifeboat slung outboard. Crews to stand by to lower. Then report to the bridge.’ He rang down to the engine-room for Slow Ahead then said to Harrison: ‘Hard a-port. Steer north.’
Denholm, who had moved out on to the starboard wing, returned, lowering his binoculars.
‘Well, even I can see that plane. Not a plane, rather a huge streamer of smoke. Could that have been the bandit, sir—if it was a bandit?’
‘Must have been.’
Denholm said, tentatively: ‘I don’t care much for his line of approach, sir.’
‘I don’t care much for it myself, Lieutenant, especially if it’s a military plane and even more especially if it’s carrying bombs of any sort. If you look, you’ll see that we’re getting out of its way.’
‘Ah. Evasive action.’ Denholm hesitated, then said doubtfully: ‘Well, as long as he doesn’t alter course.’
‘Dead men don’t alter courses.’
‘That they don’t.’ Van Gelder had just returned to the bridge. ‘And the man or the men behind the controls of that plane are surely dead. No point in my staying there, sir—Gibson’s better with the spy-glass camera than I am and he’s very busy with it. We’ll have plenty of photographs to show you but I doubt whether we’ll be able to learn very much from them.’
‘As bad as that? You weren’t able to establish anything?’
‘Very little, I’m afraid. I did see the outer engine on the port wing. So it’s a four-engined jet. Civil or military, I’ve no idea.’
‘A moment, please.’ Talbot moved out on the port wing, looked aft, saw that the blazing plane—there was no mistaking the flames now—was due astern, at less than half the height and distance than when he had first seen it, returned to the bridge, told Harrison