The Dark Crusader (aka The Black Shrike) by Alistair MacLean

Author:Alistair MacLean [MacLean, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Friday 3.30 a.m.–6 a.m.

The rain eased and finally stopped altogether, but the night stayed dark. And the sharks stayed away. We made slow time, because I couldn’t use my left arm to help me along, but we made time and after almost an hour, when I calculated that we must be at least half a mile beyond the barbed-wire fences, we started angling in slowly for shore.

Less than two hundred yards from land I discovered that our change in direction was premature, the high wall of cliff extended farther round the south of the island than I had imagined it would. There was nothing for it but to trudge slowly on – by this time ‘swimming’ would have been a complete and flattering misnomer for our laboured and clumsy movements through the water – and hope that we wouldn’t lose our sense of direction in the slight obscuring drizzle that had again begun to fall.

Luck stayed with us and so did our sense of direction, for when the drizzle finally lifted I could see that we were no more than a hundred and fifty yards from a thin ribbon of sand that marked the shore-line. It felt more like a hundred and fifty miles, at least to me it did. I had the vague impression that an undertow was pulling us out into the lagoon all the time, but I knew this couldn’t be so, otherwise we would have been swept far out long ago. It was just sheer weakness. But my awareness was not of effort or exhaustion but almost wholly of frustration: the urgency so desperate, the progress so infuriatingly slow.

My feet touched bottom and I staggered upright in less than three feet of water: I swayed and would have fallen had not Marie caught my arm, she was in far better shape than I was. Side by side we waded slowly ashore and the way I felt no one ever looked less like Venus emerging from the deeps than I did right then. Together we stumbled on to the shore, then, two minds with but one thought, we sat down heavily on the damp sand.

‘God, at last!’ I gasped. The breath was wheezing in and out of my lungs like air through the sides of a moth-eaten bellows. ‘I thought we’d never make it.’

‘Neither did we,’ a drawling voice agreed. We swung round only to be blinded by the bright white glare from a pair of torches. ‘You certainly took your time. Please don’t try – Good Lord! A female!’

Although biologically accurate enough it struck me as a singularly inept term to describe Marie Hopeman, but I let it pass. Instead I scrambled painfully to my feet and said: ‘You saw us coming?’

‘For the past twenty minutes,’ he drawled. ‘We have radar and infra-red that would pick up the head of a shrimp if it stuck itself above water. My word, a woman! What’s your name? Are you armed?’ The grasshopper mind, a clear-cut case for Pelmanism.

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