The second man was quite different, a slight, stolid looking man with fair hair and a very bronzed complexion wearing a blue Naval coat and a pair of dirty white trousers, with dark blue sneakers on his feet. To my astonishment, he carried a bow and arrow.
It was not an ordinary bow, but a small, brightly shining bow of what looked like brushed steel, not much more than thirty-six inches long, small enough to slip down a trouser leg if need be to hide it from watchful, curious eyes. The string was drawn back, but only a trifle, and his thumb was hooked over it in the old Mongolian draw—almost the first time I’d seen this. The arrow was about twenty inches long, and quite heavy, an unusually thick arrow made from steel rod with a hunting head on it, what looked like the Howard Hill broadhead, and instead of feathers it was fitted with a fur fletch. There was a quiver across his back, high up at his neck, with another twelve or fifteen shafts in it. It startled me to see so unusual a weapon, and I wondered what sort of man he was.
I turned round to see who was at the light switch, and there he was, a thick-set, burly man with close-cropped hair and pale blue eyes, well over six feet tall and looking very tough indeed, with huge, well-developed forearms under the tightly rolled up sleeves of his khaki shirt. He, too, carried a sawed-off shotgun, and there was an indescribable air of affinity among the three of them; they looked like a wolf pack together, as though each were part of the others. The close-cropped hair gave him the look of a soldier, and the tan was straight out of Africa.
There was a look of controlled impatience on his face, like the face of a schoolmaster who’s found one of the boys in the pantry in the middle of the night. He looked quickly at Astrid and back to me, his expression not changing, and he said, quite quietly and with no sort of expression in his voice:
“Well, who are you, and what are you doing here?” There was no anger in his voice at all; it was as though the question were purely academic, as though, almost, he didn’t really expect an answer.
I said mildly: “My name’s Cabot Cain, and I came looking for General Queluz. Simple enough.”
He didn’t waste any time on more formality. He held his shotgun loosely in his hand and moved to one side a little, a move that seemed on the surface to have no meaning at all till I looked back again at the two men by the door. They had moved out, each to one side, and the third man had merely moved instantly and casually out of their line of possible fire. I looked back at him, and he jerked his gun towards the hanging body and said:
“How did you know he was here?”
I shrugged. “We had a dinner appointment. His servant said he’d come down here, so we came looking for him.”
“Just the two of you?”
I didn’t expect to deceive him, but I thought that at least I might try. I said: “Just the two of us and my driver. He’s outside somewhere.”
The man with the bow laughed, a sudden, inexplicably queer sort of laugh. He held the bow and the arrow in one hand, the index finger of the left hand curled round the shaft to hold it still in position, and made quick, elusive gestures with his right. So we’d been watched as we arrived. The third man nodded, accepting the signal. He jerked his head towards the open hole in the floor that was the lobster trap and said briefly:
“Get down there, both of you.”
I said: “No.”
A flicker of impatience crossed his face. Still no anger, just a touch of irritation. He said roughly: “In there, or I’ll blow both your heads off.”
I looked up at the sign on the wall. “And bring the whole lot down on us?”
Staring at him, Astrid whispered: “Did you...kill him?”
Now there was a curious look in his eye, and I knew why. We’d been talking Portuguese—his accent was Angolan—and Astrid spoke it badly. He looked at her sharply and switched to English, with a strong Scottish accent:
“Och, so you’re Americans then. Aye, and it’s a natural characteristic, is it not, minding everybody’s business but your own? Now, get down there, the both of you.”
I said again: “No.”
There was a little silence. He took a deep breath, a sigh almost, and said carefully, a schoolmaster explaining to a not-too-bright schoolboy: “Look, the world I live in we don’t worry too much about risks, we just take them. You’d probably call me a very careless fellow, but in my language that just means that if a chance has got to be taken, then by God I’ll take it. If I bring the roof down on us we’re close enough to the door to make it. Now, get down there, I won’t tell you again.”
It was all a question of likelihoods, and likelihood is stronger than truth. There was a look on his face, not a temporary expression but a strange set to the line of the mouth, a composure in the eyes that told me he was not exaggerating. I suppose an old-fashioned term for it would be a kind of guts written all over his face, a look of casual determination that said this man would take the most extraordinary chances and think nothing of them at all. You meet that kind of man sometimes; and it’s mostly in wartime; they make the best soldiers.
I looked at the other two, and I suppose I was unconsciously calculating their capacity. The thin man with the shotgun did not stir; he was chewing a piece of tobacco nonchalantly. But the other man, the one with the bow, suddenly made a move. He pulled back the string and let fly with a shaft, and then, so fast that I literally did not see the movement, another arrow left the bow and a third was there, drawn back, in its place. I heard the thump as the arrows struck home; they’d both passed between Astrid and me, and we were standing close together, so close that our bodies were almost touching. And he hadn’t even aimed—just the instinctive aim that a boy uses with a slingshot. I looked back over my shoulder and found that both the shafts had found a mark in a heavy wooden spar that supported the winch to the lobster trap.
And then he laughed again. With his wild eyes and his tousled fair hair, he looked like Harpo Marx; but only temporarily. In a moment, the madness in his eyes was a violent fanaticism. He stood there now with his feet apart, his body loose and controlled, and remained immobile and placid and...expectant. I looked at the two arrows again; they were buried deep in the oak, two inches deep or more.
I shrugged. I moved over to the edge of the pit and jumped down in. I’m six feet seven, and the water came up to my waist, and the massive concrete closure was a foot above my head. The smell of lobster was ripe in the air now, and I was standing on them, feeling them wriggle as some of them crushed under the weight of my two hundred and ten pounds; they must have been packed tight down there, five or six deep. I held out my arms for Astrid as she stood looking down at me, the harsh light showing up the terrible fear on her face.
I said gently: “It’s not as bad as it seems.”
The cadaverous man moved in swiftly behind her and put out a straight arm and shoved, and she fell into my arms with a strangled sort of a sob, and I held her there and watched them reaching up for the rope on the winch, staring up into the light and waiting. In a moment, the concrete slab swung into place with an oddly metallic ring, and there was only absolute darkness,
I heard Astrid sob. She said, her voice low: “Oh, God...” I held her tight for a moment or two, clear off the bottom, listening; but there was only silence to hear. Her body was wet and cold and frail, and I thought: it’s going to be a lot worse.
I said to her, very quietly: “I’m going to put you down. The water will come up to your shoulders and you’ll be standing on a mass of lobsters, but they won’t hurt you.”
There was silence again. And then, inexplicably—and something which pleased me enormously—she said with almost a grunt: “Then I’d better pull myself together, hadn’t I?”
I said: “Yes, you had indeed.” I put her down at once, and she squealed and hung on to me, and said, not quite so fearfully as before: “Lobsters with claws?”
“Crawfish.” I said callously: “If we die, they’ll eat us, but we’re not going to do that. We’ve got an hour or so to get out of here.”
“An hour?”
“High tide.”
There was a long pause. She said at last, whispering: “The water may reach the roof before high tide.”
“No. The floor above was dry, and down here it wouldn’t dry off in twelve hours if any spilled up onto the concrete. And there still might be an inch or two of air even when the tide’s at its highest, so there’s plenty of hope.”
It wasn’t very true; one of the tunnels had sloped upward and there were concrete manholes up there too, which meant we were in one of the lower ones. And the floor had been thoroughly wet, only I hoped she might not have noticed or might have forgotten. Anyway, she seemed to take my word for it, which argued a nice sensibility.
The water was freezing, and those dammed crustaceans were squiggling and writhing under our feet, paying us back for eating their brothers and sisters.
I said: “We’ll give those men five minutes to get clear.”
“And then?”
