White Cargo

by Stuart Woods

  He tried to speak, but his throat and tongue were as dry as paper. Nothing would work. The nurse seemed to understand and poured him a glass of water from a bedside thermos, stuck a glass straw in it, and offered it to him. He drank some cool water, then flushed his mouth until the paper feeling went away.

  “Where?” he managed to say.

  “You are in Cuba,” the woman replied. Her accent was only slight.

  “My family,” he said. He had to know if it had been real.

  Her face twitched. “I’ll get somebody,” she said, and left the room.

  A couple of minutes passed, then the nurse returned with a young man in a white jacket over what looked like naval uniform trousers. “I’m Dr. Caldwell,” he said to Cat, reaching for his pulse. “How are you feeling?”

  Cat merely nodded. “My wife and daughter are dead,” Cat said. He stated it as a fact; he didn’t want to give the man an opportunity to lie to him.

  The young man nodded. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “You remember, then.”

  Cat nodded. “Are you Cuban?”

  The doctor looked puzzled for a moment. “Oh, no,” he said, finally. “You’re at Gantánamo Naval Base, not on Cuban soil. A Coast Guard search and rescue chopper brought you in here two days ago.”

  “How badly am I hurt?”

  “Well, you weren’t in very good shape when you arrived. We spent a couple of hours picking birdshot out of you. What was it, a .410-gauge?”

  Cat nodded. “My own.”

  “Be glad it wasn’t a twelve-gauge and buckshot. You’re in no danger, as far as I can tell. In fact, I’m surprised it took you so long to come around. It was almost as if you didn’t want to wake up.”

  “The boat?”

  “There’s an investigating officer here; I’ve sent for him. He’ll fill you in.”

  As if on cue, another officer, a lieutenant, entered the room. “Hello, Mr. Catledge,” he said. “Welcome back.”

  Cat nodded. “Thanks.”

  “You feel up to a chat?”

  “Okay.” He pointed at the bed. “Can you crank this thing up?”

  The officer raised the bed until Cat was nearly sitting.

  “The boat?” Cat asked again. He wanted to ask about bodies.

  “My name is Lieutenant Frank Adams, call me Frank. I’m a military police officer. Is your name Wendell Catledge?”

  Cat nodded.

  Adams looked relieved. “I ran your fingerprints,” he said, “and we got the registration on your boat. You didn’t have any identification.”

  Cat lifted his left arm and looked at the wrist. “My name is engraved on the inside of my watch.” There was a white stripe against his yellowing tan.

  “You weren’t wearing a watch.”

  “I’m sure I had it on when they came,” Cat said. “It was a little before six in the morning. What about the boat and my wife and daughter.”

  Adams pulled up a chair and sat down. “A little after eight in the morning, Thursday, that’s two days ago, a Lufthansa flight from Bogotá to San Juan picked up the signal from your EPIRB. Less than an hour later, a Coast Guard helicopter found the boat and put two frogmen in the water. She was well down by the bows. You were in the cockpit. Your . . . the women were in the main cabin, both dead. Before the two men could even get you into the chopper, the boat stood on her nose and went straight down. You were in the water for a couple of minutes before they got you up. The bodies went down with the boat. There was nothing they could do.”

  Cat nodded, and his eyes filled with tears.

  “Your brother-in-law is here, staying in our bachelor officer quarters; I’ve sent for him. Do you think you can tell me about it now? I want to do everything I can, but I need the details.” Adams produced a small tape recorder.

  Cat got hold of himself and began at the beginning.

  • • •

  When Cat woke up again, Ben Nicholas, Katie’s brother and Cat’s business partner, was sitting next to the bed, his normally open, friendly face showing the shock. Before Cat could speak, Ben took his hand.

  “You don’t have to tell me about it,” he said with some difficulty. “Lieutenant Adams played the tape recording for me. He was very impressed with how thorough you were.”

  “Thank you, Ben,” Cat said. “How long have you been here?”

  “I got in last night. They flew me in a Navy plane from Miami. They’ve made me comfortable. Never thought I’d get to Cuba.”

  “Me, either. Does Dell know?”

  “The doctor says we can move you to Atlanta in a day or two. I’ve got an air ambulance standing by in Miami. They’ll hop over here when we get the word.”

  “Have you told Dell?”

  Ben shook his head. “I couldn’t find him, Cat. There was an answering machine on his phone; I didn’t want to tell him that way. I went around to his place, in that high rise; nobody answered the bell. Doorman said he hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. Liz is calling him every hour. She wants you to stay with us until you’re better. She’d have been here herself, but her mother’s in the hospital again. The P.R. guy at the office has been dealing with the press. Some wire-service reporter got onto it, from the Coast Guard, I guess, then a business reporter at The New York Times recognized your name, then the Atlanta papers went with it, and . . . well, all hell broke loose. There wasn’t any way to avoid having the details made public. It was just too sensational a story—well-known businessman-inventor, all that.”

  Cat nodded. “Ben, it’s my fault; I did it to Katie and Jinx.”

  “No, no, Cat, you mustn’t think that. You didn’t deliberately put them in danger; you couldn’t have foreseen this.”

  “I took them into that place. Katie didn’t want to go, I talked her into it, I pushed her.”

  “Listen to me, Cat,” Ben said. “I know how much you loved Katie and Jinx. You just did what you thought was best, and it went wrong. It happens like that sometimes; you can’t see something like that coming. It’s nobody’s fault but the people who did it. Katie would see it that way; Jinx, too. That’s the way you’ve got to see it. You’ll go nuts if you don’t.”

  They both began crying. Cat got an arm around Ben, and they sat that way for a moment, sobbing. After they had composed themselves and Ben had gone, Cat knew he would not cry anymore. He couldn’t allow himself that much self-pity again, not if he was to go on living.

  His memory began to pluck at him, but he pushed it aside, blanked it out. He couldn’t bear to see that scene on the yacht again. An image forced its way into his head, though, skirting his defenses. The handprint stood out, vivid and red. Then the anger began. And through the anger came a question: Why? Not just why him or why Katie and Jinx, but why at all? His best memory of the yacht after those people had left was that it was absolutely intact. All the expensive electronics were in place, the boat had no appearance of having been ransacked. They had many possessions on board that a thief would have wanted, but none of them had been taken. He had no enemies that he knew of, and anyway, this thing couldn’t have been planned, because the decision to sail into Colombian waters had been made on the spur of the moment. Not until the dawn of that terrible day had he, himself, known that they would be sailing into Santa Marta.

  To all appearances, these people had committed a wanton act of piracy and two murders—three, they thought—for no gain except a twenty-five-hundred-dollar Rolex wristwatch. It made no sense whatever, and that made Cat angrier still.

  He knew that Katie and Jinx were lost beyond hope, that he could never have them back, but almost as much as he wanted the people who had killed them, he wanted to know why it had been done.

  He began building toward a state of new resolve: He would spend every dime he had and the rest of his life, if necessary, to find out.

  6

  CAT CLIMBED OUT OF THE POOL BEHIND HIS HOUSE AND walked up and down on the flagstones for a moment, breathing deeply. This was so much easier than it had been in
the beginning, he thought. He’d been as weak as a kitten when he had gotten out of the hospital. He’d started swimming laps to stretch his chest muscles, damaged by the shotgun blast, and he’d learned to enjoy the workouts, as much as he was capable of enjoying anything. It was better than sitting in a chair, staring straight ahead. He’d done enough of that.

  He had lost thirty pounds in the hospital and nearly another twenty since. He weighed the same as he had the year he graduated from high school, and he felt in better shape, strong, tanned, and fit. He still surprised himself when he encountered a mirror—slim, clean-shaven, and close-cropped for the first time in years. He had gained the new fitness with swimming and with hitting tennis balls back at a machine. They were both suitably solitary activities. He had played tennis a couple of times at the club and discovered he didn’t want the company; he preferred to sweat in solitude.

  Someone called to him from the back of the house. Cat turned to see Wallace Henderson, a retired Atlanta police captain, now a highly regarded private investigator, approaching. With a feeling of dread, he shook the man’s hand and offered him a chair at poolside while he got into a terry-cloth robe. He knew what was coming.

  “It’s come to this, Mr. Catledge,” Henderson said. “My people and I have spent nearly three months and a considerable sum of your money running down every conceivable lead and theory of this case. We have telephoned or seen every dentist in San Diego and the surrounding Southern Californian communities and found two who have a son named Denny; one was a junior in high school and one was three years old. We have checked the crew lists for the last ten years on the yacht races this Denny says he sailed. Nothing there. We have liaised with the State Department and the Colombian police; the Colombians have distributed the artist’s sketches based on your descriptions of the two men—you didn’t get a good enough look at the woman for a description; they’ve circulated a description of your wristwatch and the engraving on the back. We’ve had the Colombian Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard on constant lookout for a sportfishing boat called Santa Maria—turns out that’s a very common name for a boat in Latin American countries—and there’s been no sign of such a boat. We’ve had a salvage company look at the possibility of raising your yacht and recovering the bodies, but she sank in more than a thousand fathoms of water and is unrecoverable.

  “The fact is, sir, I don’t think that I can, in good faith, take any more of your money. I was a police officer for twenty-five years, and I’ve been a private investigator for nearly ten, and I tell you, I have never dealt with a case with so little to go on and so many dead ends. Now, there’s a chance that one or more of the queries we’ve made might produce some sort of answer sometime in the future—maybe they’ll find the Santa Maria, for instance—but that is unpredictable and entirely out of our hands.

  “I’m not going to tell you, Mr. Catledge, that you should forget that your wife and daughter were murdered and your yacht sunk; I’m not going to tell you that we’ll never know why or that the people who did it will never be brought to justice. But I have to tell you that, right now, I don’t know of a single other way to make that happen.” The man shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I just don’t,” he said with finality.

  “Captain, we could send a couple of operatives down there,” Cat said, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice.

  Henderson shook his head. “No, sir—I mean, we could do that; I could, through some of my colleagues, probably find a couple of Latinos who could blend in down there, but the Colombian police—thanks to the pressure you brought on the State Department—did what I consider a first-class job of investigation in Santa Marta. You’ve read the translated reports; no outsider I could send in there could possibly do half as well. At least you’ve got the interest of the police down there. If they turn up something, we’ll hear about it.”

  Cat heaved a sigh. “I suppose you’re right,” he said, wearily. “I’ve paid you for your skill and advice, and you’ve given me both, Captain Henderson, and I’m grateful to you.” He stood. “I guess I’m just going to have to wait until something new turns up.” He offered his hand. “Send me your bill for any work outstanding.”

  Henderson took his hand. “I want you to know, sir, that I consider this a personal defeat for me. But I’ve given it my best. I hope you’ll call me if you hear anything new.” The man left.

  • • •

  Cat got into the Porsche and drove. He was a fast driver and had the traffic tickets to prove it, but today he drove listlessly, carelessly. It had occurred to him more than once to take the car out somewhere and crash it into a tree or a bridge abutment and end the whole thing. All that had kept him going had been the hope of finding Denny and his cohorts, and now that seemed a remote possibility.

  Ben and Liz had been wonderful, having him to dinner, inviting friends over, keeping him from becoming a recluse. There had even been a couple of attempts to fix him up with women, evenings that had fizzled. He simply had no interest in women, or, for that matter, anything else. Even the business, which had once given him so much satisfaction, had no further appeal for him. He had not spent more than a few hours at the office; the people there had tiptoed around him, and he hadn’t felt in the least necessary. Ben had been getting feelers about a takeover by a larger company, and that was fine with Cat, not that he needed the money.

  He suddenly felt ill and pulled the car over. He sat on the grass verge of the roadway, fighting nausea, trying to think of something else to do for Katie and Jinx, for some reason to go on living, and not having much luck. Suddenly, there was a loud roar overhead, and a shadow passed across the car. Cat looked up and discovered that he was parked at the end of a runway at Peachtree Dekalb Airport, a general aviation field on the outskirts of Atlanta. He watched the light airplane climb, turn, and start back toward the field.

  Cat started the car and drove around to the main entrance of the airport. Passing through the gate, he immediately saw a sign reading “PDK Flight Academy.” A few moments later he sat across a desk from a pleasant man who explained the flight-training program to him. Half an hour later he sat at the end of a runway in a Cessna 152 trainer and listened carefully to the fresh-faced young instructor seated next to him.

  “Okay,” the kid was saying, “full throttle, keep the airplane on the center line, watch your airspeed, and rotate at fifty knots.”

  Cat pushed in the throttle, and the little airplane started to roll. He steered with the rudder pedals, nervously watching the airspeed indicator. At fifty knots he pulled back on the yoke and the airplane leapt off the runway, leaving his stomach on the ground.

  “Continue straight ahead and climb to three thousand feet,” the instructor said. A few minutes later they were over Lake Lanier, forty miles to the north of the city, practicing turns. Flying was something he’d thought about off and on over the years, but he had never had the time. Now he had nothing but time. An hour later, Cat had been issued a flight manual and enrolled in the flying school.

  That night he stayed up late reading the manual. The next day he took a two-hour lesson. The day after that, another. He began flying every day the weather was decent, studying the manual and workbook whenever he was grounded. He registered in a weekend seminar to accelerate his academic training and passed the FAA written examination the following day with a perfect score. He soloed ten days after beginning his training and began flying the airplane alone on practice sessions and on cross-country flights. His concentration was total. He read every flying magazine he could get his hands on, every book he could squeeze in. He clung to the training doggedly, obsessively. It filled his life, left no room to think about anything else, and that was what he wanted.

  In the middle of his fourth week of training, his instructor met him at the airplane after a solo flight. “I’ve scheduled you for a check ride with an FAA examiner for your private pilot’s license tomorrow morning at ten o’clock,” the young man said. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Catledge, you’ve se
t a record around here. I’ve never seen anybody work so hard and get so much packed into so short a time. I think you’ll do just fine on your check ride.” They spent an hour filling out forms and making sure Cat’s logbook was up to date, then Cat went home, buoyed with the idea that tomorrow, after a flying test he was confident he could pass, he would be a licensed private pilot. He started thinking about training for an instrument rating.

  Back at the house, he changed into a swimsuit and went out to the pool. He dived in and began swimming slow, steady laps, balancing his kicks on each side, measuring his strokes, working every muscle. He swam twenty laps, then heaved himself onto the side of the pool, sucking in deep breaths. There was water in his eyes, and it took him a moment to realize that somebody was standing at the opposite end of the pool, staring at him. The figure was tall and slim, rather like the man he had been seeing in the mirror lately.

  “Hello, Dell,” he said, finally, to his son.

  The boy said nothing, just stood and stared blankly at him.

  “You haven’t been around,” Cat said, trying to keep his voice neutral. “We’ve been trying to locate you. You’ve heard?”

  Dell did not move any closer, but nodded. “I’ve been out of the country. I read about it in the papers when it happened.”

  “Why didn’t you come home? There was a memorial service; a lot of people were there.”

  Dell seemed to think a moment before he replied. “I didn’t come home because there was nothing I could do for Mother and Jinx, and because if I had come home, I might have killed you. You killed them, after all; that’s how I see it.”

  Cat nodded. “For once, we agree on something.”

  “You accept responsibility then?” Dell asked, surprised.

  “I do,” Cat replied. “One of the things about being an adult is, you have to accept responsibility for your actions. One of these days, maybe, you’ll learn about that.”