Free The Dark Crusader by Alistair MacLean Page B

before you inflate." I was already shrugging into my own harness. She appeared to be taking her time about adjusting the straps so I said: "Please hurry."
    "There is no hurry," she said. "Henry said 'I suppose we'll have to wait a couple of hours before we do anything' and Fleck said, 'Yes, that at least.' Maybe they're going to wait until it gets really dark."
    "Or maybe they don't want the crew to see anything. The reasons don't matter. What does matter is that the two-hour delay refers to the time when they intend ditching us. Maybe there is an island and they want to get well past it in case we should be washed up there before the sharks get to us. They could come for us any time. And you're overlooking the fact that when they do discover we're missing the first thing they'll do is to back-track and search. I don't much fancy being run down by a schooner or chopped to pieces by a propeller blade or just used for a little target practice. The sooner we're gone the less chance we have of being picked up when they do discover we're missing."
    "I hadn't thought of that," she admitted.
    "It's like the colonel told you," I said. "Bentall thinks of everything."
    She didn't think that worth any comment so we finished fixing the lifebelts in silence. I gave her the torch and asked her to hold it in position while I climbed up the ladder with the bottle-screw and two hardwood battens and set about opening the hatch. I placed one of the hardwood battens on the top rung, set one end of the bottle-screw on the wood directly above the rung and unscrewed the upper eyebolt until it was firmly against the other batten which I'd placed under the hatch, to spread the load. I could hear the rain drumming furiously on the hatch and shivered involuntarily at the prospect of the imminent soaking, which was pretty silly when I came to consider just how much wetter I would be a few seconds later.
    Forcing that hatch-cover was easy. Either the wood of the cover was old and dry or the screws holding the bolt in position were rusted for I'd only given the central shank of the bottle-screw half-a-dozen turns, the counter-threaded eye-bolts steadily forcing themselves further apart, when I heard the first creak of the wood beginning to give way and splinter. Another half-dozen turns and suddenly all resistance to my turning had ceased. The bolt had come clear of its moorings and the way out was clear-if, that was to say, Fleck and his friends weren't standing there patiently waiting to blow my head off as soon as it appeared above the level of the hatch. There was only one way to find that out, it didn't appeal much but at least it was logical. I would stick my head out and see what happened to it.
    I handed down the battens and bottle-screw, checked that the two water drums were conveniently to hand, softly told Marie to switch off the torch, eased the hatch-cover open a few inches and cautiously felt for the bolt. It was just where it ought to have been, lying loose on top of the hatch-cover. I lowered it gently to the deck, bent my back as I took another two steps up the ladder, hooked my fingers over the edge of the hatch-cover and straightened both back and arm in one movement so that the hinged cover swung vertically open and my head was suddenly two feet above deck level. A jack-in-the-box couldn't have done any better. Nobody shot me.
    Nobody shot me because there was nobody there to shoot me, and mere was nobody there to shoot me because no one but a very special type of moron would have ventured out on that deck without an absolutely compelling reason. Even then he would have required a suit of armour. If you were willing to stand at the bottom of Niagara Falls and say to yourself that it was only raining, then you could have said it was raining that night. If anyone ever gets around to inventing a machine gun that fires water instead of bullets I'll know exactly what it will be like at the receiving end. Enormous cold drops of water, so