The Adventures of Tintin

the door made Tintin jump. He looked back and saw that the crowbar was holding where he had wedged it into the wheel. The wheel turned a little back and forth, and Tintin heard voices from the other side, out in the hall. “Jiggle it a little bit,” Tom was saying. “It’s just stuck.”
    There was a smack and a yelp from Tom. “It’s not stuck, you idiot!” Allan said. “He’s bolted it from the inside.”
    Tintin knew he would have to act fast now that they knew he had removed the ropes that were binding him. He started looking around the room to see what else might be of use. “So you want to play it like that, do you?” Allan called from outside. “Tintin!”
    Tintin didn’t answer.
    Then he heard Allan say, “Get the dynamite.”
    Uh-oh
, Tintin thought. Now he was
really
going to have to move fast. “Broken crates, rope, champagne,” he said, looking around. “What else do we have, Snowy?”
    Snowy growled at whatever was in the crate Tintin had pushed over to the porthole. An answering growl came from within and Snowy backed away.
    “There are other ways to open this door, Tintin!” Allan roared from the hall. “They’ll be swabbing the decks with your innards when we’re done with you!”
    Points for originality
, thought Tintin. But he doubted his innards would be very useful in getting the decks clean. He pushed a crate of champagne away from a corner and positioned it directly in front of the door, perhaps ten feet away. He tipped the crate on its side so all the bottles were aimed at the door, then carefully—very carefully—worked the top off the crate. Part one of the plan was in place, but it wouldn’t do any good if he couldn’t make part two work.
    He started breaking up an empty crate. Allan was yelling at someone to hurry up, and a hubbub of voices out in the hall told Tintin that more of Sakharine’s goons were gathering.
    Something thunked against the door. Tintin guessed it was those explosives Allan had mentioned. “This had better work, Snowy,” Tintin said, and went back to the porthole, dragging with him a number of planks tied together and tethered to a long rope fashioned from shorter pieces of rope tied together. He fed the planks out the porthole and then the rope until the whole string of them was twisting and waving in the wind.
    He leaned back into the hold to check on Snowy and see that the rest of his arrangements were in place. Everything looked about right. Then he started smelling the scent of a burning fuse.
    “Here we go,” Tintin said. He started to swing the length of knotted-together rope back and forth, building momentum, until he let the planks at the end fly straight up toward an open porthole above him. The bundle of planks went up, up . . . and missed!
    And then, before Tintin could duck out of the way, the planks came straight back down and conked him right on the head, exactly where Nestor had hit him with the candlestick.
    Tintin saw stars, but he was able to hold on to the rope. This was no time to be knocked out! If Allan and Tom got into the hold, Tintin wasn’t ever going to wake up again.
    He took a couple of deep breaths. Behind him, on the floor, Snowy whined. Everything was quiet out in the hall. Tintin figured that the henchmen were all hiding away from the impending explosion. He hefted the planks, waited as they banged off the hull of the ship below him near the churning waterline, and then tossed the bundle up again.
    The rope extended and looped away from the ship in the wind, and Tintin snapped his wrist to arc the planks toward the porthole above him. He almost overbalanced and fell out the porthole. Behind him, Snowy grabbed his pants leg and held on.
    The snap of Tintin’s wrist sent the planks right through the porthole above, and then he yanked on the rope to twist them against the window. It worked! The planks turned and functioned as an anchor to the porthole above, and Tintin now had a rope he could climb up to