"How long have I been lying here?" I asked suddenly. My voice sounded in my ears like the husky quivering of an old old man, but maybe it was just the echo inside the cave.
"About an hour." Funny, Griffith's voice didn't sound a bit like an old man's. "Brookman says you'll be all right. Chipped kneecap, that's all. You'll be walking again in a week."
"Did we-did we all get here all right?"
"Everyone made it." Sure everyone made it. Marie Hope-man didn't make it. Why should they care? What was all the world to me was only a name to them, Marie Hopeman was down there alone in the armoury and I would never see her again but she was only a name. It didn't really matter if you were only a name. And I would never see her again, never. Never was a long time. Even in this last thing, this most important thing I'd ever know, I'd failed. I'd failed Marie. And now it was never. Never was going to be for always.
"Bentall!" Griffith's voice was sharp. "Are you all right?"
"I'm all right."
"You're talking to yourself again."
"Am I?" I reached out and touched the dead man. "What happened?"
"LeClerc sent him in. I don't know whether he thought we'd retreated to the other end of the cave or whether it was a kind of suicide mission. Chalmers waited till he was all the way in. And then we had two guns."
"And what else. An hour is a long time."
"They tried firing into the cave after that. But they had to stand in front if they weren't going to do it blindly. They soon gave it up. Then they tried to blow up the entrance, to seal it off."
"They would try that," I said. "It wouldn't have made much difference, we could have got out. What they meant to do, if things had gone their way, would have been to blow in the tunnel roof for a hundred yards or so. That would really have finished us." I wondered vaguely why I was saying this, none of it mattered anymore.
"They set off one charge, above the entrance," Griffiths was continuing. "Nothing much happened. Then we heard them working just outside, using picks to make holes for more charges. We flung out a couple of fused amatol blocks. I think they lost some men. They didn't try anything like that again."
"The note," I said. "Didn't you tell them about the note."
"Of course," Griffiths said impatiently. I had told Fleck to leave a copy of a faked radio message on the wireless table, saying: 'Message acknowledged: H.M.S. Kandahar proceeding high speed Suva-Vardu. Expect arrive 8:30 a.m.' The inference would be that Fleck had sent an S.O.S. by radio. "We told LeClerc a naval vessel was coming. He wouldn't believe us, saying it was impossible, the sentry had been there to prevent messages from being sent, but Fleck said he'd been asleep. Maybe the sentry was one of those killed, I don't know. We told him he'd find the message on the schooner. He sent someone to fetch it. LeClerc couldn't afford to ignore it, it might mean he had only three hours left. Less, for Fleck says the Captain of the Grasshopper, without him to pilot it in, wouldn't attempt the gap in the reef before daybreak."
"LeClerc would be pleased."
"He was mad. He was out there talking to us and we could hear his voice shaking with fury. He kept asking for you but we told him you were unconscious. He said he would shoot Miss Hopeman if you didn't come out, so I told him you were dying."
"That would cheer him up," I said drearily.
"It seemed to," Griffiths admitted. "Then he went away. Perhaps he took his men with him. We don't know."
"Yes," Fleck said heavily. "And the first man to stick his head out the entrance gets it blown off."
Time passed. The light at the mouth of the tunnel steadily brightened through all stages of dawn, until finally we could see a washed-out patch of blue. The sun was up.
"Griffiths." It was LeClerc's voice from outside and it had us all jumping. "Do you hear me?"
"I hear you."
"Is Bentall there?"
Griffiths waved a cautionary hand to silence me, but I ignored it.
"I'm here, LeClerc."
"I thought you were dying, Bentall?" His voice held a vicious overtone, the first time I'd heard anything of the kind from him.
"What do you want?"
"I want you, Bentall."
"I'm here. Come in and take me out."
"Listen, Bentall. Don't you want to save Miss Hopeman's life?"
This was it. I should have expected this last desperate move to force my hand. LeClerc wanted me badly, he wanted me very badly indeed.
"And then you've got us both, is that it, LeClerc?" I'd no doubt that was it.
"I give you my word. I'll send her in."
"Don't listen," Captain Griffiths warned me in an urgent whisper. "Once he's got you, he'll use you as bait to get someone like me out, and so on. Or he'll just kill you both."
I knew which it would be. He'd just kill us both. He wasn't interested in the others, but he had to kill us both. Me, at any rate. But it was a chance I had to take. Maybe he wouldn't dispose of us straight away, he might take us aboard the ship with him, it was one last chance, it wasn't a chance in a million, but it was a chance. That was all I asked, a chance. I might save us both yet and as the thought came I knew I never could. It wasn't even that million to one chance, but it was like what Marie had said, sitting in the electric chair, and the man pulling the switch, and still hoping. I said: "All right, LeClerc, I'm coming out."
I hadn't seen the signal. Fleck, Henry and Griffiths reached me in the same instant, pinning me to the ground. For a few seconds I struggled like a madman, but I hadn't the strength left to struggle any longer.
"Let me go," I whispered. "For God's sake let me go."
"We're not letting you go," Griffiths said. He raised his voice. "All right, LeClerc, you can leave. We've got Bentall, and we're keeping him. You know why."
"Then I shall have to kill Miss Hopeman," LeClerc said savagely. "I'm going to kill her, do you hear, Bentall? I'm going to kill her. But not today, not for some time yet. Or perhaps she'll kill herself first. Goodbye, Bentall. Thank you for the Black Shrike."
We heard the sound of departing footsteps and then there was only the silence… The three men took their hands away and Fleck said: "I'm sorry, boy, I'm more sorry than I can say."
I didn't answer. I just sat there, wondering why the world didn't come to an end. By and by I heaved myself painfully on to my hands and one knee and said: "I'm going out."
"Don't be so damn stupid." I could see by the expression on Griffith's face that he was regaining his first impression of me, one that had been far from favourable. "They'll be waiting."
"He can't afford to wait any longer. It's what time, now?"
"Almost seven."
"He'll be on his way. He wouldn't risk the Black Shrike for a chance at my life. Don't try to stop me, please. I've something to do."
I crawled out through the narrow mouth of the tunnel and looked around. For a few seconds I couldn't see anything, the shooting stabs from my kneecap blurred my eyes and put everything out of focus. Then the focus came back. There was no one there. No living person, that was.
There were three dead men lying outside the entrance. Two Chinese and Hewell, of course it would have been Hewell who would have been supervising the placing of the charges to blow in the mouth of the tunnel, and the exploding blocks of amatol had torn half the giant's chest away, anything less than that would never have taken his life. I saw the metallic snout of a gun barrel sticking out from under his body. I bent and pulled it clear with difficulty. It was fully loaded.
"It's all right," I said, "they've gone."
Ten minutes later we were all making our way slowly down to the hangar. Brookman was right, I thought dully, it would be a week or more before I could walk properly again, but the navy boys took turns at helping me along, taking almost half my weight.