The 'coast guard' vessel Regula had returned to its mother ship and was being winched aboard prior to being lowered, dripping with sea water, into the cavernous hold of Firestorm. And by now Henderson was alone on the bridge, leaning out of a smashed window as he watched the last gunners leaving. He was enclosed inside the bridge with the bodies of the dead East German security guards and attached to all entrances to the bridge were the special bombs — bombs which exploded outwards on detonation away from the interior of the bridge. The objective was to ensure that anyone who might escape from the dining-room could never reach the controls on the bridge alive.
It had been Viktor Rashkin's plan to swim the two miles to Bornholm's shoreline, taking his time, but as he saw a power-boat with one man aboard heading in his direction he took a swift decision. The power-boat was heading on a course which would take it past him by about twenty yards. He waited for the right moment, hoisted himself briefly out of the water and waved.
The crewman from Firestorm saw him and changed course, reducing speed. His orders were to pick up as many men as he could in the shortest possible time. The fact that the man swimming in the sea carried no flashing light did not strike him as strange, nor did he notice that the colour of the frogman's suit was wrong. He hauled his first rescue aboard.
"How did it go?" he asked before he started up the engine to continue the night's work. He was gazing at the man he had picked up who was removing his face-mask with his left hand while his right hand tugged at some equipment behind his back. Both men were now seated and facing each other.
"It went well. All according to plan," Rashkin replied.
"Beaurain will be pleased… "
The rescuer broke off in mid-sentence. He had seen Rashkin's face — which briefly expressed alarm at the reference to Beaurain — and knew that this was not one of Henderson's gunners. And then Rashkin's right hand swung round from behind his back and plunged the knife it held up to the hilt in the chest of his rescuer.
The man gurgled, his eyes stared, he slumped forward. Rashkin used both hands to heave him over the side and then gave all his attention to what was happening around him. Switching off the searchlight at the bow of his own power-boat, he turned on the throttle. Then he guided the power-boat towards the west coast of Bornholm. He had earlier taken the trouble to read about the island and he was heading for a quiet stretch of the Danish shore. It always paid to take every contingency into account. He was now trying to recall the flight times of the local aircraft which flew from Bonne airfield to Copenhagen.
Inside the huge dining-room of Kometa the members of the Stockholm Syndicate seemed to be gripped by paralytic fear, an emotion which froze all power of decision. At the head of the table Leo Gehn, one of the most powerful men in the western world, sat like a Buddha, apparently working out the potential profits from the region of the north European sector allocated to him earlier in the meeting. When Count d'Arlezzo, a slim Italian who, conversely, could not keep still, peered over the American's shoulder he saw to his horror that Gehn was repeating on his pad the same figures over and over again.
Most of the rest of the thirty people present stayed well away from the doors and pressed their faces against the windows. They were staring at the flashing lamp of the lighthouse above The Hammer of Bornholm. Ironically, the arbiters of blackmail, murder and wholesale intimidation were stricken with indecision.
On the bridge Henderson left the ship following the route the others had taken, but under rather different circumstances. The Kometa was now reared up on its giant foils. The vessel was moving at its top speed of thirty knots. The hydrofoil was on a fixed course plotted by the Scot and was working on automatic pilot. He climbed out of one of the smashed windows and made for the rail as the wind hit him. Holding on to an upright, he flexed both legs, waiting for the ship to ride on an even keel if only for a few seconds. Now!
He dived outwards and downwards, passing well clear of the foil and plunging vertically into the Baltic — far enough away, he hoped, and deep enough down to clear the lethal clawing suction from the propeller. As he surfaced he was amazed to see how far Kometa had travelled, a receding cluster of lights. He pressed down the switch which turned on the red light attached to his head-gear. Recovering from the impact of the deep dive he saw close by the power-boat despatched from Firestorm with the sole purpose of rescuing Henderson.
The vertical cliffs of The Hammer are protected by isolated pinnacles of rock which rise up out of the sea like immense rocky daggers. Round the base of these leviathans of nature the sea swirled gently, hardly moving, so still was the Baltic on that night and at that hour. Kometa hurtled on like a projectile, reared up on its foils, approaching The Hammer at right angles. The last moments must have been a terrifying experience for the men who had planned to weld all the evil in the West into one huge crime syndicate. Then Kometa struck.
The collision between flying metal hull and immovable rocky bastion was shattering and thunderous. But fractions of a second later it was followed by the detonation of the explosives Henderson had attached to the foil — explosives which were timed to go off within fifteen minutes, but which also detonated on any major impact. The meeting between Kometa and The Hammer was a major impact. The ship fragmented instantly. The explosion hurled one of the foils high in the air before it crashed back into the sea. The hull actually telescoped, squashing like a concertina before the bow sank, so, for a few moments, the stern hung in the air.
A plume of black smoke rose from the base of The Hammer, dispersed by a gentle breeze which was now blowing. Then there was nothing. No trace that Kometa had ever existed. And only the sound of the power-boat's engine as it sped back towards Firestorm.
Sitting motionless in the stern Beaurain was unusually silent. He pointed out to no-one what he had also seen the cotton-thin wake of a power-boat proceeding south of them at a measured pace towards the west coast of Bornholm. When he later heard that one power-boat had mysteriously not returned he knew that Viktor Rashkin had escaped.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The signals went out from Firestorm at midnight. Beaurain sent them in prearranged codes to Fondberg waiting in Stockholm, to Marker waiting at the strangely-shaped police headquarters in Copenhagen, and also to Chief Inspector Willy Flamen in Brussels.
By ten minutes after midnight the biggest dragnet ever launched on the continent was under way as detector vans and fleets of patrol cars waited for a spate of Syndicate transmissions. They started at exactly three in the morning. Fondberg phoned Beaurain over the ship's radio-telephone shortly afterwards.
"What was the significance of your timing?" the Swede asked.
"Because someone must have reached Bornholm about midnight. His first task would be to send a message warning what is left of the Syndicate of the catastrophe."
"What catastrophe?"
"Wait for news from Bornholm tomorrow morning."
"Anyway you were right! It's working!"
Fondberg sounded excited. All over Europe the detector vans were homing in on the sources of the mysterious transmissions — because for the first time they were not looking on the roads. They were concentrating on the waterways. And due to the emergency the transmissions were prolonged.
In Belgium, France and Holland, barges were being boarded as the Syndicate's radio operators were caught in the middle of transmitting. In Denmark, ships in the Oresund were being boarded. In Sweden, launches and cruisers on the waterways inside Stockholm were being raided. In Germany the barges were on the Rhine. And by launching synchronised attacks at precisely the same moment there was no opportunity for one section of the Syndicate to warn another. At one sweeping blow the entire communications system — without which the Syndicate could not operate — was wiped out.