I moved my eyes to the right. Carreras and son were standing just where they had been, and Tony Carreras had a gun in his hand now. My gun. Beyond them a huddled group lay sprawling or sitting about the floor. Cerdan, the “nurse” I’d shot, and three others.

Tommy Wilson, the laughing, lovable, happy-go-lucky Tommy Wilson, was dead. He wouldn’t have to worry about his mathematics any more.

It didn’t need old doc Marston and his short-sighted peering to tell me that Wilson was dead. He was lying on his back, and it looked to me as if half his chest had been shot away; he must have taken the main brunt of that concentrated burst of machine-gun fire. And Tommy hadn’t even lifted his gun.

Archie Macdonald was stretched out on his side, close to Wilson. He seemed to me to be very still, far, far too still. I couldn’t see the front of his body for he was turned away from me; for all I knew magnum slugs had torn the life out of him as they had out of Tommy Wilson. But I could see blood all over his face and neck, slowly soaking into the carpet.

Captain Bullen was the one who was sitting. He wasn’t dead anyway, but I wouldn’t have bet a brass farthing on his chances of staying alive. He was fully conscious, his mouth warped and dragged into an unnatural smile, his face white and twisted with pain. From shoulder almost to the waist his right side was soaked in blood, so soaked that I couldn’t see where the bullets had gone home, but I could see bright red bubbles flecking the twisted lips, which meant that he had been shot through the lung.

I looked at the three of them again. Bullen, Macdonald, Wilson. Three better men it would have been hard to find, three better shipmates impossible to find. They had wanted none of this, none of this blood and agony and death; all they had wanted was the chance to do their jobs in peace and quiet and as best they could. Hard-working, companionable, and infinitely decent men, they had sought no violence, thought no violence, so now they lay there dead and dying, Macdonald and Bullen with their wives and families, Tommy Wilson with his fiancée in England and a girl in every port in America and the Caribbean. I looked at them and I felt no sadness or sorrow or anger or shock; I just felt cold and detached and strangely uninvolved in it all. I looked from them to the Carreras family and Cerdan and I made myself a promise, and it was well for me that neither Carreras heard my promise or knew of its irrevocable finality, for they were clever, calculating men and they would have shot me dead as I lay there.

I wasn’t feeling any pain at all, but I remembered about the pile driver that had hurled me back against the bar. I looked down at my left leg, and from mid-thigh to well below the knee the trousers were so saturated with blood that there was no trace of white left. The carpet all round my leg was soaked with it. That carpet, I remembered vaguely, had cost over $10,000, and it was certainly taking a terrible beating that night. Lord Dexter would have been furious. I looked at my leg again and fingered the soggy material. Three distinct tears, which meant that I had been shot three times. I supposed the pain would come later. A great deal of blood, far too much blood: I wondered if an artery had been torn.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” It was Carreras speaking, and although his hand must have been giving him hell there was no sign of it in his face. The fury, the malevolence I had so recently seen, was only a memory: he was back on balance again, urbane, commanding, in complete control of the situation. “I regret all this, regret it extremely.” He waved his left hand in the direction of Bullen and Wilson, Macdonald and myself. “All so unnecessary, so terribly unnecessary, brought upon Captain Bullen and his men by Captain Bullen’s reckless folly.” Most of the passengers were on their feet now, and I could see Susan Beresford standing beside her father, staring down at me as if she weren’t seeing too well, eyes abnormally large in the pale face. “I regret, too, the distress you have been caused, and to you, Mr. and Mrs. Beresford, I tend my apologies for the ruin of your night’s entertainment. Your kindness has been ill-rewarded.”

“For god’s sake cut out the fancy speeches,” I interrupted. My voice didn’t sound like mine at all, a harsh, strained croak, a bullfrog with laryngitis. “Get the doctor for Captain Bullen. He’s been shot through the lung.”

He looked at me speculatively, then at Bullen, then back at me. “A certain indestructible quality about you, Mr. Carter,” he said thoughtfully. He bent over and peered at my blood stained leg. “Shot three times, your leg must be pretty badly smashed, yet you can observe so tiny a detail as a fleck of blood on Captain Bullen’s mouth. You are incapacitated, and I am glad. Had your captain, officers, and crew been composed exclusively of men like yourself, I would never have come within a thousand miles of the Campari. As for the doctor, he will be here soon. He is tending a man on the bridge.”

“Jamieson? Our Third Officer?”

“Mr. Jamieson is beyond all help,” he said curtly. “Like captain Bullen, he fancied himself as a man cast in a heroic mould; like captain Bullen, he has paid the price for his stupidity. The man at the wheel was struck in the arm by a stray bullet.” he turned to face the passengers. “You need have no further worry about your personal safety. The Campari is now completely in my hands and will remain so. However, you form no part of my plans and will be transferred in two or three days to another vessel. Meanwhile you will all eat, live, and sleep in this room: I cannot spare individual guards for each stateroom. Mattresses and blankets will be brought to you. If you co-operate, you can exist in reasonable comforts; you certainly have no more to fear.”

“What is the meaning of this damnable outrage, Carreras?” There was a shake in Beresford’s voice. “Those desperadoes, those killers, what of them? Who are they? Where in the name of God did they come from? What do you intend to do? You’re mad, man, completely mad. Surely you know you can’t expect to get off with this?” “You may use that thought for consolation. Ah, doctor, there you are.” He held out his right hand, swathed in its bloodstained handkerchief. “Have a look at this, will you?”

“Damn you and your hand,” Dr. Marston said bitterly. The old boy was trembling; the sight of the dead and dying must have hit him hard, but he was hopping mad for all that. “There are other more seriously injured men here. I must…”

“You may as well realise that I, and I alone, give the orders from now on,” Carreras interrupted. “My hand. At once. Ah, Juan.” This to a tall, thin, swarthy man who had just entered, a rolled-up chart under his arm. “Give that to Mr. Carter here. That’s him, yes. Mr. Carter, Captain Bullen said — and I have been aware of it for many hours — that we are heading for Nassau and are due there in less than four hours. Lay off a course to take us well clear of Nassau, to the east, then out midway between the Great Abaco and Eleuthera islands and so approximately north-northwest into the north Atlantic. My own navigation has become rather rusty, I fear. Mark in the approximate times for course changes.”

I took the chart, pencil, parallel rulers, and dividers, and laid the chart on my knee. Carreras said consideringly, “What, no ‘do your own damned navigation’ or words to that effect?”

“What’s the point?” I said wearily. “You wouldn’t hesitate to line up all the passengers and shoot them one by one if I didn’t co-operate.”

“It’s a pleasure to deal with a man who sees and accepts the inevitable.” Carreras smiled. “But you greatly overestimate my ruthlessness. Later, Mr. Carter, when we have you fixed up you shall become a permanent installation on the bridge. It is unfortunate, but I suppose you realise that you are the only deck officer left to us?”