White Death Page 15

  Smith didn’t reply to that. Both men were struggling to keep their tempers. Fahad began to pace up and down the room. Smith slumped deeper into his chair and jammed both hands into his jacket pockets. It was a casual enough gesture, but I knew that he had his hand on a gun. I began to entertain a faint hope.

  Fahad looked at Smith. His face betrayed nothing, but I knew that he also knew. In a moderate voice, Fahad said, “There is no cause for argument between us, Mr. Smith. Our association has been mutually profitable. What is done cannot be helped. And we both know what still needs doing.”

  “Right,” Smith said.

  “Having gone this far,” Fahad said, “we cannot turn back. To turn back is unthinkable. Just consider; even if you could make some kind of arrangement for yourself with the authorities—and I don’t believe for a moment you could—what about your crew?”

  “This doesn’t concern them.”

  “But it does,” Fahad insisted. “Your crewmen have shared the risks with us, and also the heroin profits—and also the responsibilities. Your crewmen never killed anyone; but just like you, they are accessories to murder.”

  Fahad smiled and paused for effect. “So they are all murderers according to the law. Perhaps, with a great deal of luck, the government would let you plead to a lesser charge. But what about the men of your crew? Should they rely on the well-known kindness that the American government shows to murderers?”

  Smith’s eyes moved to the two crewmen beside him. They hadn’t spoken, and they weren’t saying anything now. But they still had guns in their hands, and they were watching Smith.

  The silence seemed endless. Then Smith took his hands out of his pockets—empty.

  “Okay, so I guess that’s it,” he said.

  “I knew you would understand,” Fahad said. “‘Now I suggest that we hurry. The police will be searching every ship around here.”

  “But where in hell can we put them?”

  “In the same place we put the heroin.”

  Smith nodded in a vague, perfunctory manner. He looked gray-faced and old and badly shaken, like a man who has had a serious illness. Now for the first time I could believe that he didn’t like murder; I could believe that his entire being shrank from the necessity of killing us. Under different circumstances, I might have felt a little sorry for Mr. Smith. But as it was, all I could feel was a curious aching emptiness, as though my living body were trying to anticipate its own death.

  Under the eyes of Fahad and the crewmen, Mr. Smith drew the gun from his pocket. He pointed it at us.

  “Well, boys, I’m sorry,” he said, “but this is how it’s gotta be. I want you to go quietly and without any fuss. If you start anything, we won’t have any choice; we’ll have to shoot.”

  All men prefer to postpone their deaths for as long as possible, even if it is only a matter of minutes. So we followed Fahad into the corridor, quietly and without any fuss.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  At the end of the corridor we came to an iron staircase. We descended into the bowels of the ship, then walked along another corridor. Fahad stopped us in front of an oval hatch in the bulkhead and one of the seamen took out a wrench and unfastneed the dozen large nuts that held the cover in place. We were ordered to go in.

  We found ourselves in a deep, empty rectangular room. Far overhead, through a small grilled cover, the first streaks of daylight illuminated our prison. We heard a clang as the seamen dogged the cover back into place, and then no sound at all.

  Chitai had recovered his spirits enough to curse the heroin smugglers, and also to curse himself for not having died fighting in the cabin. But he found a grisly sort of comfort in the thought of the final battle he would wage.

  “You see, Achmed,” he said to me, “they will have to take us out of this place sometime or other. Far out at sea, I suppose, where they can dispose of our bodies. Well, a man must accept the death that God sends him. But I swear to you, Achmed, if I am to die, one or two of those murdering bastards will die with me.”

  For once I found nothing ridiculous about this Turkoman bragging. In fact, there was an odd sort of grandeur to it, and at that moment, I loved Chitai like a brother. I would gladly have left him with his splendid dreams; but he would find out the truth very soon, and I decided it was best if I told him now.

  “Chitai,” I said, “please forgive me, I wish with all my heart that it could end as you say. But it won’t.”

  “It will!” he said. “Achmed, they must come for us—”

  “By then we’ll be already dead.”

  “You’re crazy!” Chitai protested.

  I shook my head. “This is not a cargo vessel,” I said. “This is a tanker.”

  “What of it?”

  “Before the tankers leave Abadan, they fill up with oil. I’m very sorry, Chitai.”

  He stared at the iron walls, then at the small grill overhead. Slowly the truth came to him.

  “You mean we are in a part of the ship where they store oil?”

  I nodded.

  “And they will fill this place with oil, thereby drowning us?”

  “That is what they will do,” I said.

  Chitai thought about this, and I expected him to break into a senseless rage. But instead, very quietly, he said, “Then we must search quickly for a way out.”

  I didn’t tell him that there was no way out. I said, “You’re right, let’s start looking.”

  The first thing we had to look for was Dain, who was no longer standing beside us. After a moment I located him. He had found a ladder leading up the side of the hold to the barred grill in the deck. He was tugging furiously at the bars.

  Chitai and I climbed up the ladder. Before we reached the top, we heard a grinding noise overhead.

  “What was that?” Chitai asked.

  “Let’s get up the ladder,” I said.

  “But what made that noise? Do you think perhaps someone—”

  Then he saw what had happened as a dense black stream as thick as a man’s thigh spurted from an opening above us. The crewmen were pumping oil into our hold.

  We crowded around the top of the ladder, all of us trying to get handholds on the grill. There was barely room for one man up there; but finally, with Dain on one side of the ladder and me on the other, and with Chitai perched on my shoulders, we all had a grip on the grill. Below, an inch of oil flowed over the deckplates. Above, our hands were clamped to the thick iron bars of the grill, wrenching and pulling at them, fighting with the desperation of the damned.

  I don’t believe we could have loosened those bars with a sledge hammer; nothing short of an acetylene torch would have done the job. But we pulled until our eyeballs bulged in our faces, because it was the only thing to do. And the oil continued to rise.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  And now I face the difficulty which comes to all those who insist on telling their own stories. I must tell how it ends.

  In all honesty, I cannot say that we broke out of that hold through our own efforts. I wish it had happened that way, and I feel sure that it is the ending Chitai will relate to his tribesmen, who, being simple-minded, may well believe him. But only a Turkoman could believe that three men would be capable of breaking through a thick, well-fastened iron grill with nothing but their bare hands.

  An Isfahani, on the contrary, being a sophisticated creature, would expect a trick door or a sliding panel to make its appearance now. Or he would look for a scientific revelation, such as the well-known bursting effect of oil pressure upon iron grills, otherwise known as Raki’s Law. This ending would also please me, especially if I could say that I knew all about it in advance. But alas, it didn’t happen in that way.

  We were not drowned. But no human strength could prevail against that grill. No sliding panels were discovered, and no scientific revelation came to our aid. The situation was beyond our powers.

  Then how did we escape?

  We were rescued.

  Thus, in a sing
le line, I have disappointed everyone except those rare persons who enjoy hearing the truth. There it is, and I can offer only one thing in compensation: the details of our rescue.

  Because—how on earth were we saved? Given the number of possible hiding places in Abadan, and the completeness of our disappearance, the details of our rescue might be looked upon as very pleasing. Not quite as pleasing as if I had wrenched out a few iron bars, but satisfying all the same.

  At the time we speeded away after Flaherty’s truck, we had left Hansen and one of the Ma’dan to guard the evidence in the cottage. Time passed, we didn’t return, and our friends grew concerned. Unable to communicate with each other, each man thought his own thoughts, and feared the worst.

  The Ma’di, like all of his race, was a superstitious creature, much given to visions and premonitions. He became convinced very quickly that we were in trouble, and he hurried off to help us. Somehow he collected a force of thirty-odd Arab laborers, and he ordered them to follow him. It must have been the most glorious moment of his life, but he didn’t let it go to his head. Steadfastly he followed his premonition, and never for a second did he doubt that strange sixth sense beyond the grasp of reason. He led his ragged men through the center of Abadan, down to the docks, and past an endless line of ships. Then he turned to a solitary white building owned by the Trans-Gulf Shipping Corporation.

  “This is the place,” he said to his followers. “Break down the doors and find my friends.”

  Under his spell, the laborers did exactly what he said. They didn’t find us, of course; but they created a large disturbance. And oddly enough, they had broken into the building owned by Mr. Smith, from which he conducted his heroin operations under the guise of a legitimate oil business. When the police came, they found a number of incriminating papers. It never pays to laugh at a Ma’di’s intuition.

  Hansen, left alone in Flaherty’s cottage, did some very heavy thinking. He was a logical man, and he went about things in a logical way. He decided that the first thing he needed was more information about Flaherty. To find it, he began telephoning Europeans all over Abadan.

  He learned the interesting fact that Flaherty was a good friend of a policeman named Fahad. More telephoning elicited the fact that Fahad had been driving our jeep, and had vanished with us. Hansen decided that Fahad was a possible accomplice, and he searched for more information.

  He learned that Fahad had shown considerable interest in the Trans-Gulf Shipping Corporation. Instantly he realized that Flaherty’s company, the Chesapeake and Virginia Oil Company, was a mere blind. In a flash of deduction, the truth was revealed to him. And when he learned that Trans-Gulf owned a small refinery in the town—which it never used—everything was clear. Without a moment’s hesitation, he telephoned Abadan’s Chief of Police, tersely related the facts, and demanded that the refinery be searched and our bodies recovered.

  The Chief of Police did this. But he had more information than Hansen, and he knew that a Trans-Gulf tanker was loaded and ready to put to sea. He had run out of policemen by now, so he commandeered a squad of soldiers and sent them to the tanker. His move showed extremely clear thinking, and it was no fault of his that he picked the wrong ship out of the Trans-Gulf fleet.

  It remained for a young Irani corporal to make the final move. This corporal had been ordered to take his men and search every ship and every warehouse along a stretch of waterfront. Because of the gunfire earlier, and because of the Ma’di’s speech-making, Hansen’s telephoning, and the Police Chief’s ordering, this corporal had a very fair idea of what was going on. By this time, everyone else in Abadan shared the corporal’s knowledge—but not his opportunities. For, as he marched his men down the docks, the corporal saw a very strange sight.

  It was the first crack of dawn, and just about time for the muezzin’s call. The long rows of ships were silent and deserted, since the Moslems were praying and the Christians were sleeping. In another hour, after prayer and breakfast, the docks would swarm with laboring men. But for the moment, all was quiet and peaceful.

  Except on one ship.

  The corporal saw that men were hard at work on one tanker out of the long row of tankers. They were hooking up a dockside oil line to their ship, sweating and cursing with the slippery connections, and shouting at each other as they worked the pumping equipment. Their labor at this hour was strange enough; but their strained and unnatural haste was even stranger.

  The corporal acted on his own initiative, just as everyone else in Abadan was doing. He ordered the sailors to stop pumping.

  There followed, I am told, a very lively gun duel. The corporal sent a private for reinforcements, and the private returned with a full platoon of men, an armored car, and an ancient but still serviceable Sherman tank. The sailors surrendered before the tank could go into action; but the tank gunner, out of pique, fired several shots into the side of the ship.

  The crew was rounded up, Mr. Smith was captured without difficulty, and Fahad was fished out of the water by the police launch. He had been trying to swim across the Shatt-al-Arab to the Iraqi shore.

  The Police Chief telephoned to Basra and requested a search for the Habbaniya. Iraqi troops were dispatched at once, and the countryside was combed. But the order had come too late. Soon it was evident that the Habbaniya would not be captured.

  Hansen, the Ma’di, and the Police Chief related their stories to various government officials, and also to several reporters. It was only when one of the reporters asked for a statement from Mr. Dain that everyone realized that we had not been rescued yet.

  So the oil was turned off at last, having filled approximately half the compartment. Hatches were undogged, and Dain, Chitai and I emerged into the welcome daylight.

  We thanked the corporal profusely, for we owed our lives to him. However, as Dain pointed out, we also owed our lives to Hansen, the Ma’di, and the Police Chief. Through the combined efforts of all these men, every possible hiding place had been searched, and our rescue had been assured, no matter where we had been taken. Dain was certainly right when he said that we might just as easily have been hidden on another tanker, or in the refinery, or in the main office.

  Trans-Gulf Oil, I learned later, was owned outright by an American criminal syndicate. They actually made operating expenses from their oil business; but their real profit came from narcotics. The heroin, sealed into waterproof packages and weighted, was dropped into a hold of one of the tankers. No customs inspector had ever bothered sifting through several thousand gallons of unrefined black oil in search of a package of heroin; but perhaps they will start now. In all fairness, I should mention that Trans-Gulf owned five tankers, but never smuggled heroin on more than one at a time.

  As we prepared to leave Abadan, we were told that Mr. Smith had urgently requested to see us. We visited him in the jail, where the Police Chief had him under heavy guard. He seemed very cheerful for a condemned man, and he told us that his real name was Wynoski. He accepted a cigarette from Dain, sat back grinning at us, and then said, “Well, boys, we really pulled it off, huh?”

  “What are you talking about?” Dain asked.

  “That stuff we were talking about earlier, on the ship,” Smith said. “Like I told you then, murder’s not my sort of thing. So as soon as you pointed out my legal position, Mr. Dain, I knew what I had to do.”

  “You had to have us killed,” Dain said. “And you came close to succeeding.”

  “Me have you killed?” Smith said in a voice of shocked indignation. “That’s gratitude! Look, Dain, I saved your life. You offered me a deal there on the ship, remember? No first-degree murder charge. You aren’t going to welsh on that now, are you?”

  Dain said, “Your actions didn’t seem very instrumental in saving our lives, Mr. Smith. Quite the contrary, I’d say.”

  “You would, huh? That’s because you aren’t thinking straight. Goddammit, I couldn’t just open the cabin door and let you walk out, not with Fahad and the crew boys there. They w
ere watching me. You remember that?”

  Dain nodded.

  “So after Fahad’s little speech,” Smith said. “I had to watch myself, play along. If I tried anything cute, it had to be very cute indeed.”

  “All right,” Dain said. “But I don’t see what you did.”

  “Well, listen a minute,” Smith said. “Let me fill you in. When you showed up, I knew we’d had it. U.S. Customs may be dumb, but not that dumb. If you disappear in Abadan, they check up on every tanker going out, and they find that Trans-Gulf is owned by a couple of dummy corporations, which in turn are owned by a group of gentlemen who are prominent on the Attorney General’s list. After that, by working overtime and calling in outside experts, they’d be a cinch to figure that the heroin had to be hidden in the oil. So when we docked in Savannah, there’d be a large group of legal gentlemen to greet us.”

  “So what?” Dain said. “You could have dumped us and the heroin overboard and sailed in clean.”

  “I thought of that,” Smith said. “But it wasn’t good enough. This is a big Operation, and it’s been going on for close to five years. I couldn’t be sure that some government man wouldn’t dig up something. Also, even if there isn’t any evidence, somebody’s gotta take the fall just to get the law off the necks of the board of directors. And who takes the fall? Me, I take the fall.”

  “Why you?” Dain asked.

  “Because I’m the owner of record,” Smith said. “On paper, Trans-Gulf is my baby. I do the fronting, I get paid damned well, and I take the fall if something goes wrong. Which was okay by me. But I wasn’t about to take it for first-degree murder. Not even the board of directors expected that, and we agreed on no murder. But then Fahad had to go louse everything up, and I had to get out from under. Which I proceeded to do.”

  “How?” Dain asked.

  “By saving your lives.”

  “Yes, but how?”