Alistair MacLean

Fear is the Key


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      ALISTAIR MACLEAN

      Fear is the Key

       Copyright

      HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1963

      First published in Great Britain by Collins 1961

      Copyright © Devoran Trustees Ltd 1961

      Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019 Cover photograph © Stephen Mulcahey

      Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780006159919

      Ebook Edition SEPTEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780007289264

      Version: 2020-09-04

       Dedication

       To W.A. Murray

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Chapter 3

       Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Epilogue

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       By Alistair Maclean

       About the Publisher

       Foreword

      The Second World War changed everything, including how authors became authors. Case in point: a boy was born in Scotland, in 1922, and raised in Daviot, which was a tiny village southeast of Inverness, near the remote northern tip of the British mainland, closer to Oslo in Norway than London in England. In the 1920s and 30s such settlements almost certainly had no electricity or running water. They were not reached by the infant BBC’s wireless service. The boy had three brothers, but otherwise saw no one except a handful of neighbors. Adding to his isolation, his father was a minister in the Church of Scotland, and the family spoke only Gaelic at home, until the boy was six, when he started to learn English as a second language. Historical precedent suggested such a boy would go on to live his whole life within a ten-mile radius, perhaps working a rural white-collar job, perhaps as a land agent or country solicitor. Eventually the BBC’s long-wave Home Service would have become scratchily audible, and ghostly black and white television would have arrived decades later, when the boy was already middle aged. Such would have been his life.

      But Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, and the isolated boy turned 18 in 1940, and joined the Royal Navy in 1941. Immediately he was plunged into the company of random strangers from all over the British Isles and the world, all locked cheek-by-jowl together in a desperate rough-and-tumble bid for survival and victory. He saw deadly danger in the North Atlantic and on Arctic convoys, including the famous PQ 17, and in the Mediterranean, and in the Far East, where ultimately his combat role was pre-empted by the atom bombs and the Japanese surrender, no doubt to his great relief, but where he saw horrors of a different kind, ferrying home the sick and skeletal survivors of Japanese prison camps. Like millions of others, the boy came out of this five-year crucible a 24-year-old man, his horizons radically expanded, his experiences increased many thousandfold, and like many of the demobilized, his nature perturbed by an inchoate restlessness, and his future dependent on a vague, unasked question: well, now what?

      The man was Alistair MacLean, and he became a schoolteacher. But the restlessness nagged at him. He wanted more. He began writing short stories, and in 1954, the year I was born, he won a newspaper competition. Legend has it the prize was a hundred pounds, which if true was an enormous sum of money – half of what my dad earned that year, as a junior but determinedly white-collar civil servant. The story was a maritime tale. The competition win was followed by a commission from the Glasgow publisher Collins, to write a novel, with a thousand-pound advance – another enormous sum. That novel