The Golden Rendezvous

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 ru

“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 pe

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 Sava

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 Sava