Koenig was still fighting for life, his breathing a series of rattling gasps it was awful to hear and which couldn’t go on for more than a few minutes longer. They didn’t want to leave him, but he was already unconscious, and time was flying past them. Goddard nodded to Karen, and they went out and hurried aft along the passageway.
She shuddered once, and drew a hand across her face. Then she asked, ‘What can we do?’
'I want one of those guns,’ he said. His voice was calm, but when she looked around at him she saw in his eyes that same feral yearning they’d had there in Madeleine Lennox’ cabin before he went for Rafferty.
‘One gun? Against six of them?’ she asked.
They had reached the doorway opening onto the after deck. Opposite it was one of the steel doors into the engine room casing. He motioned for silence, stepped over, and quietly pulled it open a few inches. He peered in at the catwalks around the great mass of the main engine and the tracery of steel ladders leading down to the floor plates thirty feet below. On a grating halfway down where he could watch all the ladders was a man with a handgun shoved into the waistband of his dungarees. That would be Spivak, standing guard over the opened sea intakes. There was no way to reach him except down the ladders right in front of him. Scratch that one.
He looked down again. With the Leander’s slow roll, a wave of water several inches deep was sweeping across the floor plates. It was already out of the bilges. He softly closed the door, and as he turned he saw the smoke swirling up around the ladder from the shelter deck where he and Karen had emerged a few minutes ago. It was coming at them from both directions.
He was thinking swiftly. The others? Lind, Mayr, the bos’n, and Karl would be on the boat deck, all armed, and only two of them, at most, busy cutting the bottoms out of the other three boats with the torch. Simple suicide. Lind alone, unarmed, could probably kill him with his bare hands. Otto? With a steel bulkhead behind him and fifty feet of open deck on each side, he was impregnable. And unless he was removed, they were all finished.
‘What could you do with a gun?’ she asked again. ‘Against all six of them?’
‘Kill Otto,’ he said.
She understood what he meant. They had to get the crew back here. Even if he could get into the engine room, he didn’t have the faintest idea how to shut off the sea intakes or start the fire pump, to say nothing of the fact he wouldn’t recognize either of them if he fell over them.
‘But as soon as they realize what Lind’s doing,’ she protested. ‘Otto won’t be able to keep them there.’
He could until it was too late, Goddard thought, but there wasn’t time to explain. They knew already. Of the thirty, Otto could stop only the first six or eight, but who was going to be in the first six or eight? Until he emptied his clip, nobody would get to the top of either of those ladders. That also meant the second wave had to climb over a ladder full of wounded men, with Lind and Mayr shooting straight down on top of them from the bridge.
Sparks! He was the only one who’d be alone and where there was a chance to reach him. He grabbed Karen by the arm and ran her down the passage to the door of the hospital. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘Bolt the door, and don’t open it until you know it’s me.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘The radio shack. I’ll only be a few minutes.’
He went up the inside companionway on the run, trying to visualize where the wireless room would be. The cage for the antenna lead-in was on the starboard side of the boat deck near the bridge, so it should be forward in the starboard passageway. He emerged into the thwartships passage of the officers’ deck and turned right, going softly now, and listening. As he turned the corner, he heard a noise ahead of him, but it wasn’t a radio receiver or the staccato chirping of continental morse; it sounded like a wrecking crew at work, metallic crashings and a splintering of glass.
It was coming from the second door in front of him. He eased up to it and peered in. The radio console with its main, emergency, and high-frequency transmitters, its receivers, and its desk and typewriter stand, was in the middle of the room, facing the door. Sparks had all three transmitters tilted out in the servicing position with their circuits and components exposed, and was standing with his back to the door, using a fire ax to reduce them to electronic hash.
Lind never missed a bet, Goddard thought. He should have realized a mind like that would never overlook even the possibility there might be another qualified operator aboard. He sighed, stepped softly up behind the Latin on bare feet, and slugged him over a kidney. Sparks slumped in agony, and dropped the ax. Goddard twisted an arm behind his back and ran him across the room into the steel bulkhead. His knees buckled. Goddard flipped him over onto his back even as he was collapsing, and he lay looking up, dazed but still conscious, the dark eyes eloquent with hatred. Kneeling beside him, Goddard patted his pockets. They were empty.
'I want a gun,’ he said.
‘La madre.’
‘Where is it?’ Goddard leaned back and could just reach the head of the dropped fire ax. He set the pointed side of it on Sparks’ throat. ‘Why not tell me now? When this goes through your voice box, you’ll have to point.’
‘I haven’t got one.’
‘I guess I should have told you,’ Goddard said. ‘I’m short of time.’ He began to press on the ax.
‘If I had a gun, I’d be glad to give it to you.’
‘Sure, I know. And where.’
‘Listen. If you’ll take that thing out of my throat, maybe I can tell you so you’ll believe me. I hate you. I hate your guts. I hate all of you arrogant pigs. But if I had a gun and thought you could stop that murdering cabrón, I’d give it to you.’
Goddard frowned, but released the pressure on the ax. ‘Why?’
‘I went into this for the money, because I needed it, and nobody was going to be hurt. But now it’s gone bad, so he’s going to leave the whole crew here to burn.’
‘What about that?’ Goddard gestured toward the wrecked transmitters.
‘He said he’d gut me. In public. And he would.’
Score another one for the Lind mind, Goddard thought; public was the operative word. You couldn’t depend on scaring a Spaniard with death; only with humiliation. He got up and tossed the ax into one of the transmitters. ‘Have at it.’
Sparks stared. ‘Just take my word for it? You’re not going to tie me up?’
‘I haven’t got time,’ Goddard said. ‘Anyway, nobody that hates me could be all bad.’ He went out and hurried down the companionway.
He might be taking a chance. If Sparks called Lind, he and Karen would be dead in the next five minutes, but he didn’t think he would. In a world of office-seekers and deodorant commercials, how could you doubt a posture like that?
Smoke was growing thicker in the passageway on the crew’s deck, boiling up in dense clouds through the hatch from below. When Karen opened the door of the hospital she was coughing with it and tears ran down her cheeks. They were out of time already; they had to do something, and now.
‘Sparks didn’t have a gun,’ he said, ‘so we’re down to the desperation stuff. We’ve got to go for Otto, and there just may be a way I can do it. As long as he’s in the middle of the deck, there’s not a prayer, because it’s at least fifty feet from the corner of the deckhouse, all in the open, and I’d never make it. But if I can get him to come toward me—’