"Innes, Hammond - The Strode Venturer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Innes Hammond)

Hammond Innes

THE STRODE VENTURE

Geoffrey Bailey was a man in search of a new job - and a new life. Then Strode & Company, City shipowners, made him a curious offer. Find Peter Strode, the family black sheep, and make sure he returns to the fold. Bailey's acceptance plunges him into a world where the smiling face of the Maldive Islands masks unseen terrors.

But the lethal dangers of the coral reefs and the remote islands were pale in comparison with the civilised jungle of high financial warfare.

And the directors of Strode & Company had too much to lose and too few scruples to care about one man's life - or death.

Author's Note

Very little is known or has ever been written about the Maldives due to the difficulties of getting there. These coral atolls, running south from Ceylon 500 miles into the Indian Ocean, are like a great barrier reef, and even to-day communication with the mainland is by sailing vessel. On one of the southernmost islands, however, an R.A.F. staging post has been established and it is to the Royal Air Force that I am indebted for the unique opportunity of visiting these remote islands on the equator and getting to know the people who inhabit them. A novel that is partly about these people, and the impact of the twentieth century upon them, must naturally include the R.A.F. who have brought that century into the islands. I should like, therefore, to make it clear that the characters of serving officers and others are entirely imaginary, though ranks and titles have, of course, been adhered.


I will now refer the reader to the following discourse with the hope that the perilous and chargeable labors and endeavours of such as thereby seek the profit and honor of her Majesty, and the English nation, shall by men of quality and virtue receive such construction, and good acceptance, as them selves would look to be rewarded withall in the like.

Sir Walter Raleigh






I

1. STRODE ORIENT

March, 1963. Looking back through my diary, as I begin this account of the strange means by which the prosperity of the company which I now serve was founded, I find it difficult to realise that there was a time when I had never been to the Maldives, had scarcely ever heard of Addu Atoll. The island we now call Ran-a-Maari had only recently been born the night I flew into London from Singapore. The stewardess had woken me shortly after four with a cup of coffee and through my window I could see the moon falling towards the west and a great bank of black cloud. The plane whispered softly as it lost height. The first lights showed below us, long ribbons of amber, orange, white and blue. And then the great sprawling mass of the city seen only as slashes of arterial brilliance, the blank spaces in between dotted with the pin-points of tiny perforations in a black sheet of paper. It was breathtaking, beautiful - immensely impressive; and it went on and on until the pattern of lights was spread from horizon to horizon.

By the time we landed the moon was gone and the sky was clouded over. A chill north-westerly wind blew a light drizzle across the apron and London Airport glimmered damply as we made our way into the terminal building. At that dead hour before the dawn the Customs and Immigration officers, all the night staff, moved with careful deliberation. But though they were slow, they still possessed that quiet air of politeness, even kindness, that always surprises one when coming home after a long sojourn abroad. I hadn't been back for over three years and the consideration with which they treated the passengers erased some of the weariness of the flight. 'Any watches or cameras?'

'No, only what's on the list.'

It was quite a long list for I thought I was returning to England for good, but he chalked my bags and let me through without charging me anything. He had a cold and perhaps he didn't want to be bothered. 'If you'd declared some sunshine I might have charged you,' he said with a tired smile. His face looked white under the lights, even the dark tan of the passengers was sallowed by the glare.

I went down the escalator and out through Channel Nine with the man who had been my companion throughout the flight, but we didn't talk. We had said all there was to say in the long hours we had been cooped up in the plane together and now we were going through the process of re-adjustment that is common to all travellers at the moment of separation into individual existence. Dawn was only just beginning to break as the coach took us into London - a slow, reluctant dawn coming grey out of a grey sky. The wet road surface reflected the pallid gleam of the street lighting. There wasn't much traffic, heavy lorries mainly and the first milk roundsmen, and in the thickening lines of semi-detached and terraced houses a scattering of lights as London began to stir from its sleep.

We crossed the Chiswick and Hammersmith fly-overs and were into the area where the dual carriageway has slashed like a sword through residential suburbs, the scars showing in the blank ends of houses, in the dead ends of streets abruptly severed. 'I'd forgotten how bloody big this city was,' my companion said. His name was Hans Straker; he was half Dutch, a big florid man with close-cropped hair bleached the colour of pale straw by the Indonesian sun. He'd been in rubber most of his life and now, in his late forties, he'd been forced to sell his estates and get out. His love of Java, where he's lived and worked in recent years, had been soured by the difficulties of operating under the Sukarno Government and the shifts he'd been put to to get his money out. Between Singapore and London I'd been given his whole life story including accounts of his early travels in the Melanesian Islands and as far afield as Polynesia. His hobby was seismography and he had talked a lot about the records he'd kept of submarine disturbances, his theory that the bed of the Indian Ocean was in process of change - a theory he expected to be confirmed by the international hydrographic survey due to commence shortly. He was almost as bitter about the loss of his seismometer as he was about his estates.

But now that we had reached London he was strangely silent, as though he, too, was over-awed by the sprawl of the great city. Which was perhaps as well since I was no longer in a mood to listen. A dawn arrival after a long flight is not the best moment to face up to one's prospects. I'd very little money and no job to come back to. On my own for the first time since I'd joined the Service at the start of the war, I was conscious of a sense of uneasiness, a lack of confidence in myself that I'd never experienced before.

My decision to leave the Navy had been based on an assessment of my prospects following Britain's application for membership of the Common Market. I spoke French and German and the way the newspapers talked at that time of the economic future of the country I thought I'd have no difficulty in finding a job. Even so, with two children at school in England, I'd never have left the Service on the strength of the gratuity alone. What finally decided to me was a letter from a London firm of solicitors offering to purchase on behalf of a client the Strode Orient shares my mother had left me. It was so unexpected, so opportune that it seemed like the hand of providence. And the price they offered was well above the market value of the shares. I had accepted at once and at the same time had applied for my discharge. And then everything had gone wrong; France had blocked Britain's entry into Europe and the London solicitors had written to say that the Company's Registrar had refused transfer of the shares under the terms of an agreement signed by mother in 1940. They had added that they had seen the letter of agreement and were satisfied that it was binding on her heirs and assigns.

I could understand my mother's acceptance of the terms for I knew her circumstances at the time, but that did not soften the blow. Indeed, it revived all the anger and bitterness I had felt as a kid when she had tried to explain to me what had happened to my father and the great shipping line we had owned. The shock of the solicitor's letter was aggravated by the fact that I had been relying on the money to start me in civilian life, for by then I knew the form. Not one of the firms I had written to had held out any prospects of employment. They wanted technicians, specialists, men with experience in their own particular field, and all I knew about was ships and how to run them. Shipping was in a hell of a mess and here I was in London, unemployed and damn' near unemployable, the only capital I possessed unsaleable, and nothing to show for my twenty-odd years in the Navy but the gratuity and a small pension.

Something of this my companion must have gathered in the long hours we'd spent together for he suddenly said, 'All this new building. I haven't been here for years, but it's still the most exciting city in the world. The sheer ramifications . . .' His small china-blue eyes stared at me. 'I envy you. You're young enough to get a kick out of starring all over again.'

It was all very well for him to talk; his wife was dead and he hadn't any children. 'School bills have to be paid,' I said.