Nosey said, ‘On a little helicopter trip, that’s where. Not that I want the pleasure of your company.’
‘Why the trip, then?’
‘There’s a guy wants to meet you, that’s why. Prefers you to be where you can’t open your trap. Never mind who. You’ll find out.’
‘No doubt. What news of Fleck, by the way?’
‘Don’t worry about Fleck.’
Shaw sat silent for a while as the car rushed on into bleak, desolate country well outside Rio Grande. A cold wind was blowing in through a window and gradually his head began to lear, the pain to subside to a dull, throbbing ache.
After a while Nosey started up again. He said, ‘You’d probably like to know about your pal Santos.’
‘Santos? What about Santos?’
Nosey gave a high laugh. ‘Only that he didn’t skip out to the mainland in time. And won’t, now. Cass had detailed a man in Rio Grande, see, for the purpose of keeping an eye on Senor Hipolito Santos.’
Shaw said, ‘You surprise me. I’d have thought you’d have killed him.’
‘Well, we didn’t, see? Don’t want to raise too much speculation among the locals, not yet anyway. Besides,’ he added, ‘there’s another reason, and it’s this. The orders are for no one to be killed if it can be avoided. That’s not me talking, it’s the big bugs. It’s policy.’
‘Oh?’ Shaw glanced sideways, wincing as the pain caught him again. ‘So the big bugs are humane, are they? Now, that does surprise me, Nosey.’
‘Me too,’ Nosey agreed, with a regretful note in his voice, ‘but I guess they have their reasons for keeping it that way — just for now.’
Chapter Seventeen
Shaw didn’t take Nosey’s well-meant advice not to try anything when they stopped, but Nosey had been dead right. Shaw didn’t even get started. Nosey side-stepped his swinging left and Cassidy once again slugged him from behind. After that he didn’t give any more trouble. Cassidy drove away, and while Shaw was coming round again the helicopter into which he had been bundled flew out from an isolated upland valley, heading on a southerly course. It was obvious enough where they were bound now: across Ushuaia towards Navarino Island and the ship. Or rather, that was what Shaw thought until he was told different.
Nosey told him that they were going a little farther than Navarino.
Nosey said that after Santos had started asking those questions, the ship had shifted berth — to Chilean waters. Neither Santos nor the Chilean authorities knew about that. And now the helicopter was heading for the waters behind Cape Horn itself. Shaw gave an involuntary shiver. Cape Horn… that desolate grey area where few ships had sailed since the last of the windjammers had left the seas fifty years before, the area of raging storm and blind fury, where the Horn stared seaward… Cape Horn, southernmost tip of the South American continent, last point of land before the southern ice-wastes, right down in Latitude 55° 59’ South and not so far from the Pole. Cape Stiff, the old square-rig sailors had called it… Cape Stiff, that towering, wind-torn eminence that divided the Pacific and South Atlantic Oceans, that graveyard of so many ships and men. The terrible cape… sometimes the windjammers had attempted to beat around it for as much as six weeks of hell and frostbite in their struggle to claw a way into those mountainous, racing seas and the prevailing westerlies… waiting and hoping for a slant, but opposed by elements so tumultuous that often a master bound for the West Coast and Australia would turn and run before the wind, running his easting down around Good Hope in the Roaring Forties to make an Australian landfall at the Leeuwin, because it was sometimes quicker to sail right round the world than to wait for the greybeards of the Horn and the screaming wind to let a ship through on a westerly course for Sydney Heads.
Shaw knew that even to think about escape from such a region was hopeless. Black despair settled in like a storm-cloud.
It was night during that short, wind-tossed trip south, and Shaw could see nothing below him in this deserted wilderness at the world’s end. In some respects, he felt, it would prove similar to the terrible terrain of the Kola Peninsula in North Russia, where he had worked not so long before. Similar, but worse — even more desolate and deserted. In the Kola Peninsula a handful of men and women had scratched together a living; here there was no living and none to try. Here only the seabirds would wheel and cry, only the ghosts of the seafarers and the wrecked windjammers caught aback off the pitch of the Horn, would roam.
Shaw shook himself free of his fancies. Nosey wasn’t, presumably, taking him right to the Horn anyway… no ship could lie off there, that was perfectly obvious! More likely they would be tucked away behind that great cape in comparatively calm water.
Soon Shaw could make out a flashing white light beneath, a little to the southward still. As he stared down at it Nosey called to the helicopter’s pilot, ‘That light. That the ship?’
‘That’s her,’ the pilot said laconically. He stared downward, eyes narrowed, teeth moving regularly, stolidly, on gum. He reached out a hand. A single beam stabbed downward from the helicopter’s signal lamp as the pilot touched the key. A moment after this a searchlight came alive immediately below them, beaming out to illuminate brilliantly a wide square on the ship’s deck, leaving everything else in pitch darkness except for small red lights at the tops of what must be the masts.
The helicopter hovered for a moment, then started to drop. Faintly all around Shaw could make out the loom of high rock faces fringing the water, which was kicking up a heavy white spray along the dark and menacing coastline. As they dropped and came under the lee of those crags, the wind, which had been with them for most of the journey, left them suddenly. It tore no longer at the helicopter’s sides, no longer battered at the windows. It was as though they were dropping down into peace and calm, ‘port after stormy seas…’ and if ever there was a deceptive feeling it was that one, Shaw thought gloomily.
He watched with interest as the helicopter landed, touching down with a gentle bump on the deck, but he could see nothing beyond the floodlit area. A moment later the rotors died and the light went off, leaving a pitch blackness. Just before the light had gone out Shaw had seen men coming out across the landing-deck towards them. The pilot jerked the door open, and Nosey prodded Shaw with his gun.
‘Out,’ he said.
Shaw clambered down on to the deck, into a freezing temperature. The landing-area was now lit by a dim blue glow from a series of lamps set in a steel bulkhead at the after end of the deck. In this light Shaw made out a big, bearded man with thick white hair approaching him, a man in a uniform greatcoat and wearing a gold-edged peaked cap. There was enough light to enable him to see something else — the nose of the sub-machine-gun, which this man carried, and which was lined up on his guts.
The man said stiffly and formally in precise English, ‘Welcome, Commander Shaw. Welcome aboard the Moehne. I am Captain Lindrath, Master of this vessel.’ He looked beyond Shaw and raised his voice. ‘You are Mr Hanson?’
Nosey said oilily, ‘That’s me. Jed Hanson, skipper.’
‘Ja — good. I trust you will be comfortable aboard my ship. Come below and I will thaw out this God-forsaken cold with a glass of hot whisky. My crew will stow the helicopter, and I myself will attend to the prisoner.’
Nosey came forward, rubbing his hands. ‘Sounds okay to me, skipper.’
Captain Lindrath motioned Shaw almost politely off the landing-area and Nosey followed. The Captain called a sharp order and from somewhere a man acknowledged it smartly. As the little procession went along a kind of catwalk beside the landing-deck, a catwalk with a steel guardrail that was rimed with frost and almost burnt the flesh at the merest touch, there was a whirr of electrical machinery, and the landing deck, which was in fact a kind of platform, began to descend, taking the helicopter with it. Shaw looked down the deepening gap into a cavernous space lit with blue lights similar to those he had seen on the after bulkhead — a bulkhead that he now saw was actually a hatch-cover in process of being lowered into place over the gap. Looking around, Shaw felt puzzled. There was something extremely familiar about the Moehne. He couldn’t in fact see much of her build in that dim blue glow, but he had a strong feeling that he’d been there before.…