I missed my moment. If I had jumped him then I would have saved Linn. As it was, both of us were so stunned at the sight of the dead woman that we simply went forward and stood with Wegger looking at her. It was so silent deep in the bowels of the dead volcano that I imagined I could hear our hearts beating.
The flaring wood showed the body dressed in a sealskin jerkin with a high mandarin collar. She had on a short sealskin skirt and knee-high boots which looked as if they had come out of the 18th century. The tops of the boots were worked with a flower motif tooled into the leather.
'Who is she?' Linn managed to ask. 'She's perfectly lovely.'
Wegger's voice seemed to have deserted him. He waved the torch at the name on the wall. Then he said, 'Dina. That's all I know. Dina. She might be anyone. Perhaps a buccaneer's girl. A shipwreck survivor — anyone. I used to come here and talk to her. She was my only friend.'
Not friend, Wegger. Lover. You were in love with a dead woman. You still are.» He went on, catching his breath. 'I never said goodbye, when the cruiser's boat came. I was afraid they wouldn't wait…'
He pushed the torch forward to bring the light nearer her face.
The grey thing which emerged from the shadows on the floor was, I thought for a split second, Dina's coffin. But a coffin doesn't have a grey rusted warhead and a lean battery-compartment attached. It was a torpedo.
This was the German torpedo Prestrud and his fellow-skippers had smuggled from under the Nazi raider's nose.
The raider's main target was next to it, stacked in a little pyramid.
Gold. Ten million dollars in gold.
There were hundreds of small ingots of it, shaped like chocolate bars. Each bar had a small oval stamped in the metal with the words 'Credit Danzig' and a group of four numerals.
'By all that's holy!' I burst out.
Wegger rounded on me, as if the shock of seeing the gold had jerked him back from Dina to hard reality.
'So I was lying, was I, Shotton? Imagining it all? I was a madman whose mind had become unstuck from being marooned alone for so long? An insane killer? I'm mad, ami?'
'It can't be real — it can't!' Linn exclaimed.
'It's real, all right,' retorted Wegger. 'You fool, Shot-ton, you stupid fool! You could have had a share if you'd listened!'
'At the price of all those lives? Never!' I replied. 'I'm going to see you pay for all those lives, Wegger!'
'You'll see to it, will you, you blabbermouth!' he sneered. 'Go ahead then, go ahead!'
Now was the moment to cut the ground from under his feet.
'It's time you knew the truth, Wegger,' I said. 'You haven't a hope. You won't get away with that gold. You think you've reached Prince Edward without anyone knowing. You haven't. Every movement of yours since you turned the Quest adrift has been monitored. The GARP watchers know exactly where we are at this very minute. They also know exactly where the Quest is.'
He went into a half-crouch, as if an electric shock had hit him.
'You're bluffing, Shotton! There's no way that could be true.'
'Smit set the buoy's transmitter operating when we left the Quest,' I went on. 'Four times a day, every time the satellite passes overhead, the GARP watchers can read off her position to the nearest half-kilometre. They will have homed a long-distance rescue plane on her days ago, and ships as well…'
Wegger's voice was deadly. 'All right. Let them rescue the Quest. No one aboard knows where we went in Botany Bay. All you say about GARP knowing where we are now is so much bull. You're bluffing. It can't be done.'
'It can, and was,' I answered. 'Tell him, Linn.'
'I brought the balloon's transmitter from the Quest with me,' Linn said. 'It's a tin thing. Smit set it operating. I've carried it around all the time. It's here, inside my clothes, now…'
I saw the muscles of his face jerk tight and his eyes go killer-blank.
He swung the Luger and shot Linn through the heart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Linn spun, reeled, and pitched headlong across the body of the dead woman.
It could have been the ear-splitting concussion of the shot in the confined space which helped crack the ice across Dina's face, or it could have been solely the force of Linn's fall. Whichever it was, the ice splintered across. The mouth pulled open. It gaped teeth. In a split second the frozen half-smile became a cadaver's rictus, a hideous death-grin.
Wegger gave a cry which was more animal than human.
I don't recall clearly either the shot or the cry.
The kill-lust exploded in my brain.
I had to kill Wegger with my own hands.
I drove at him.
I was on him when the second shot went off under my right armpit. I felt the hot sear of cordite. The bullet whanged off a wall. No bullet would have stopped me then.
My first blow into his solar plexus carried all the agony of Linn behind it. I summoned up from my fatigued muscles some reserve I could not guess at.
Wegger's head came forward as the breath went out of him. I couldn't get my right fist clear in time to follow up. I chopped him across the neck with my left.
I heard but did not see the gun go flying.
Wegger lurched past, staggered, and then swung to face me. His breath whistled in his throat. He was very quick, very game, very tough. That first blow must really have hurt him.
He ran in low, baulking me from getting a clean blow to his head. His shoulder took me like a Rugby tackle. At the same time he kneed me in the groin.
I found myself flat on my back, writhing in agony.
He hadn't enough breath left to finish me off. He stood for a moment, trying to suck air. When he came a moment later I was ready for him. Sea-boots first, he tried to kick my head, I grabbed his boot, concentrated all my strength, and up-ended him.
I came back on my feet. My vision was misted with pain and the smoky light.
Wegger's hands were plucking at the strings of his parka, trying to get at the grenade.
I threw myself on him, reaching for his throat. The lacing where his hood joined the body of his weatherproof jacket saved him. It kept my choking fingers from closing his windpipe. Somehow he managed to find power enough to double his knees up and kick me clear. Gravity seemed to triple my weight. I came down with a sickening thump.
Again his left hand, his fighting hand, went to his waist where the grenade was. It came out too quickly to have untied the bomb, although my sense of time was haywire.
It held the knife with the killer whale handle.
He hurled himself at me.
I mule-kicked him in the' chest with my boots as he dived on me but I hadn't the power left to make the kick do what it should have done. It threw him off line only. Then we were both on the ground on all fours, facing one another like animals.
Wegger came back on his feet as agilely as a cat, towering and circling, looking for the coup de grace. He had all the advantages.
My boot knocked against something hard behind me. In a flash I realized what it was. I reached back, snatched up one of the gold ingots, locked it between both hands and jerked upright as Wegger plunged and struck at my throat with the knife.
The bar met his jaw and face in a kind of crude Liverpool Kiss. I heard the crunch of bone and teeth; simultaneously I felt a red-hot line of pain as the knife skidded across my neck and shoulder.
Wegger somersaulted back. I was on top of him as the knife reached out again for me, striking madly with the gold bar, insanely, out of control with the lust to kill, again and again until his knife-hand fell back tiredly and my blows seemed to be striking a skull filled with sawdust instead of bone.
I got up.
There was no sound, no movement, from Wegger. But the rock chamber was filled with my retching gasps, my whooping for breath. The singeing white-hot pain near my ear was nothing to the pain in my mind.