“Right. Well, I’m going down to the left there — see? — where this rock ridge leads down to the sea. That’ll give me good cover. When I’m at the end, and abreast of those people down there, I’m going over the top. As soon as you hear firing you give me covering fire from this end, but only providing you can bear without endangering the small man — that’s important. He’s not to be hurt on any account. Understand, hombrel”
The man nodded vigorously.
“Otherwise, shoot to kill — but don’t aim for the woman if you can help it. I’ll deal with her.” Shaw thought to himself, She’s a bitch, and a murderous bitch at that, but somehow I don’t want to leave Karina dead on the Spanish coast.
He moved away then. Debonnair called softly, “Esmonde, watch it, won’t you, darling? Look after yourself.”
Her hand was outstretched to him as he left her, but he didn’t look back and he didn’t see it. The girl’s face was all crumpled up in anxiety now; it hadn’t been so bad chasing along the roads, it was fun in a way, but this looked like being the pay-off, and she knew how things could go wrong, so easily, when the pay-off came. Shaw was making his way along behind the rock quickly now, and the boat wasn’t far off the beach. He got down to the water’s edge, heard the slow gurgle of the sea slopping up round his feet, the soft lap of the tiny wavelets; got the sharp smell of the seaweed. His feet dislodged a biggish stone which rolled down into the water, making what seemed to his overstretched nerves a devilish din; but there was no reaction from the other side of the line of rock. He waited a moment, his scalp pricking, then he edged slowly, cautiously, up the side of the rock so that he could look over. He was sure he hadn’t been heard, hadn’t been seen, that it was being assumed his party hadn’t yet split up. But he had to be careful now.
Infinitely cautious, he hauled himself up inch by inch until he was lying flat on top of the rock. He was in the full moonlight after that, but he kept dead still, and the attention of Karina’s party was engaged, and they never looked in his direction, never saw that humpy blur on the rock, a motionless humpy blur which perhaps looked like part of the rock itself. Moving as little as possible, Shaw brought up his revolver. The man with the sub-machine-gun was crouched low now, peeping round that boulder, his whole attention on that upper line of rock where Shaw had left Debonnair and the guardia. Karina and the second man were standing in the boulder’s lee, unprotected from Shaw’s line of fire, with Ackroyd moaning and sobbing between them, a horribly weird noise seeming to bubble from his lips, a noise which was somehow familiar, and made Shaw’s flesh crawl.
This poor, slobbering little chap — Domingo Felipe had told him he’d gone crazy, and by Heaven, he thought now, he sounded it… he was humming some kind of tune. And after a moment Shaw realized with a sense of shock where he’d heard something like this before; Dum-da, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da. He shivered.
Then he heard Karina’s voice calling softly to the man in the boat as it came within hailing distance, and he heard the man give some reply as he pulled in for the shelter of the boulder. He couldn’t hear what it was that passed between them, but he did catch the one word Ostrowiec. So — his hunch had been a pretty good one. Very likely Ackroyd was meant to be transferred from the fishing-vessel well out to sea beyond the Straits when the Ostrowiec had cleared the narrows.
The moon was catching Karina’s hair now, touching it up to a shower of almost liquid light, empaling the gold of her skin to make her look in some degree like a coldly arrogant goddess of a former civilization. She and her companion took the bows of the boat as it touched the beach, coming in under the lee of that big boulder under which the others still stood. They swung the boat round.
Well — they wouldn’t be looking now.
Hands outstretched, Shaw eased himself gently across the rock, dropped lightly down the other side and crouched in the shadows, his revolver ready. Unfortunately, the sudden movement had been noted, though Shaw didn’t think he’d actually been seen except as a ‘something’ which had moved across the rock. Anyway, he was going in now, so it didn’t matter.
He called, “All right, Karina. You’re surrounded and we’ve got you covered. Just move away from that boat.” His voice was very loud in that silence — shatteringly so. As soon as he’d spoken Karina had straightened, had jerked her body upright. Shaw had time to notice how perfectly the slim lines set off the taut, upthrust breasts. Then she stood motionless, just for a moment, until Shaw saw her head turn slightly as she spoke to the man who had been helping her with the boat; at once, as though obeying a sixth sense, Shaw flung himself violently sideways, and then flattened to ground. A bullet zipped into the rock just above his head — he could feel the wind of it, and the sharp pain as rock fragments tore into his shoulder. He felt the warm trickle of his blood down his back. At once he fired from the darkness, and the man dropped with a high scream of pain, twisting as he fell. Shaw saw him twitch once, horribly, on the sand, and then he lay very still.
The guardia had opened fire as ordered when the first shot had sounded up the beach, though in fact he couldn’t have seen anybody to aim at. Karina’s other companion, the one with the heavy gun, had remained in the shelter of the boulder and was now firing in bursts from there, edging round the side farthest from Shaw and dodging back the moment he’d let each stream of bullets wing up the beach. Shaw couldn’t help feeling anxiety for Debonnair. He knew she wouldn’t do anything damn silly, but she might be indiscreet if she thought he was hurt, might come out from cover. He himself was on his feet again now and was moving out, and as he came into the patch of moonlight he heard the guardia’s pathetic old carbine bang out again, and he saw the flat-backed black helmet glinting in the moon’s beams. The sub-machine-gunner was quick — too quick for Shaw, much too quick for the guardia; in a split-second his weapon was up and that wicked, chilling phut-phut-phut screamed up the beach, a sustained burst zipping across before Shaw could do anything about it. There was a sharp grunt of pain, very quickly nipped off, and the guardia seemed to rise into the air for an instant, and then his body flopped down on to the rock-line, hung there limply while the helmet fell from the shattered head and drooled grotesquely down the slope of the sandy beach.
Shaw felt sick.
That chap had been grabbed from his station at San Roque, had probably expected to be happily at home by now in some little whitewashed hut… now he’d be going back there in a box, and maybe some woman who’d seen him off that morning would be a widow, some children fatherless. And none of this had really been the guardia’s concern, except in so far as it was his duty to maintain the law and order of Spain. Shaw found one brief moment in which to loathe his job once more, and then, his face quite bloodless, he fired twice towards that remaining man who’d now come back behind the boulder. Shaw’s response had been slow, too slow to save that guardia, but it wasn’t all that slow, and his aim was first-class, steadied by the hate that was concentrating in him now. The large gun was only just swinging round on to him when the first bullet came from his heavy Service revolver and caught the man — it was Garcia — in the stomach and doubled him up; the second, coming a fraction of time after the first, took the man smack between the eyes and pushed the dying body straight again as the brains spattered over the sand.