Dagger Magic

On board the Lady Gregory, Peregrine was dividing his anxious attention between the submarine, which seemed to be coasting to a stop several hundred yards out, and the seeming snail's-pace of the approaching dinghies. As Eamonn tried to ease in closer for the pickup and Aoife tossed a line to Adam in the first boat, the seaplane they had spotted earlier buzzed them and continued on out to sea, descending toward a stretch of open water half a mile beyond the sub.

As it touched down in a spume of spray and running lights and coasted to a standstill, and the sub's bow began to swing away from them, the intent became immediately obvious. Quite clearly, such a rendezvous had been the plan all along - and that they must prevent.

"She's turning, Adam!" Aoife shouted, as he and Mc-Leod clambered aboard the Lady G and Magnus brought the second dinghy alongside. "She's going to rendezvous with that plane that just landed!"

"At least the business-end is turning away from us," Peregrine gasped, snubbing the second dinghy's line amidships as McLeod helped Magnus drag his unconscious passenger up into the Lady G.

"What makes you think she doesn't have aft torpedo tubes?" Magnus muttered, climbing aboard. "And if she can move, she can maybe fire them! Noel, let's get this guy below. Eamonn, hit it! - before her stern crosses us."

On the bridge of the U-636, Francis Raeburn was waiting for precisely that to happen.

"Flood both stern torpedo tubes," he called down the hatch. "Prepare for surface firing and lock on target as she comes into range."

The periscope was extended beside him, turned in the direction of the Lady G, and he could hear the sepulchral hiss of commands being given below, bearings and ranges being set. Slowly the stern of the sub continued swinging toward the approaching cruiser, turning the sub on her bow. But as the Lady G continued to close, still clear of the angle of the sub's stern tubes, Nagpo turned with almost contemptuous deliberation and pointed his Phurba at their pursuer, rolling the hilt between his palms.

The Lady Gregory's engines spluttered and died, coughing diesel fumes. There came the whirr and grind of turbines laboring as her skipper made a vain attempt to rev her up again, but she lost headway and stuttered to a halt, beginning to drift with the tide.

"Now finish them, if you wish, Gyatso," Nagpo said coldly. "But let that not delay you in your primary task."

Coupled with the effortless demonstration of power just displayed, this arrogance left Raeburn speechless. But before he could even contemplate a rejoinder, the sub's stern at last swung into line with the Lady G, and he felt the boat shudder under his feet.

He turned just in time to see the first torpedo streak away toward the cruiser lying dead in the water, its wake silvery in the moonlight. And as the deck shuddered a second time, the rolag captain came up from below, to pull himself painfully to the rail to watch the torpedoes' course.

On the Lady Gregory, as Magnus and Eamonn labored below-decks to restart the engines and Aoife manned the pilothouse, Adam and his own Huntsmen watched in mingled horror and dismay as the bright wakes of twin torpedoes streaked toward them in the moonlight. The first one went wide, buzzing past the Lady G in a wide arc to detonate against rocks father inshore; the second was off by only inches, and grazed their bow to skitter along the metal hull and off the stern, its detonator failed after fifty years. Seconds later, they saw it run up on the beach and plough into a sandbank.

Nearly limp with relief, Peregrine brought his binoculars to bear again on the submarine, now moving unmistakably toward the distant seaplane, trailing her heavy wake behind her like a train of tattered lace. Muttering, McLeod went aft to see whether either of the outboards in the dinghies would run. Aoife reported from the pilothouse that everything electrical seemed to be dead. Peregrine gasped as he finally got a good look at the three strangely assorted figures grouped together up on the conning tower, clearly visible in the moonlight. Fortunately, they no longer seemed to be concerned with the Lady G.

"Adam!" Peregrine muttered huskily. "Look at this!"

He thrust the binoculars at his mentor, but Adam already had another pair trained on the three, increasingly aware of the evil that accompanied them.

"The one is Raeburn," he acknowledged, as the moon's gleam caught the sheen of pale, fine hair and a supercilious profile, familiar both from Peregrine's sketch and from photographs in McLeod's personal case files.