“Of course,” he said.
I turned to Faye. “I never intended you should go back alone. I was just along for the ride, to make sure Calvin got on the plane, I—maybe I should come with you. If this progresses …”
Faye closed her eyes. “Get lost! You want to be my hero? You can do more good here.”
I said, “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.”
Faye said, “If nothing else, you can go and watch, and tell me what truly happens.”
Faye’s statement stunned me. I did not fully understand it, but it hit a deep chord. The call to duty arose in me then, and I was ready. “You go. And when you get there, you relax and wait. You hear me?”
“Git,” she said, teeth clenched.
With Calvin Wheat behind me, I followed a path through sand so white it seemed to glow. The dock jutted out from a cliff of petrified dunes into shallow water.
The man waiting there was bigger and darker than Hesperos, and he looked mean.
The boat … was not big. There was hardly much more to it than the raft in which I had spent the night on Sea Dingo. A low bolster of inflatable tubing ran across the bow and along both sides, projecting as two points at the stern, one to either side of a pair of beefy outboard motors. Below the tubing, the craft rode on a hard fiberglass bottom that cut into the water with a vee.
I heard the engines on the Lear jet start up. With a jolt I realized that I knew next to nothing about what I was getting myself into, except that it involved greater exposure to my least-favorite medium than I could possibly contemplate. It had been less than twenty-four hours since I had stood trembling at the idea of boarding a big boat in a narrow canal, and now here I was getting on a small one sitting low to water that continued to the far side of the Earth.
It occurred to me that I might still have time to make it back to the airstrip before they took off if I ran at full speed.
I hesitated. A little voice inside me squealed, What am I doing here?
The wave of feeling that on land had seemed a thing of pleasure here became a sodden pull on my stomach. I felt nauseated. I asked myself why I was doing this. For Jack, who dropped everything and ran off? At that moment, I could not remember what had gotten me started on the road that had brought me here.
Jack was a face I had not seen lately.
But Faye …
Faye is my friend of the heart, and she is in travail and needs me to get on this boat.
I forced my legs to carry me along as if attached to a different brain. We are going, I told them. We are on an island in a foreign country without a passport, we are going to climb into an open skiff with a total stranger and …
And what, go to war?
Somewhere in the past days, a cog had completely slipped. The scene in front of me was not making sense. My legs tightened. I felt like I was swimming in molasses. The dock thrummed under my heavy footfalls, and I had a hard time making eye contact with the man in the boat.
Calvin Wheat jogged up behind me. He said, “Nice boat! Permission to come aboard, skipper?”
The big man in the boat nodded with debonair pride.
I did my best to make a bad thing worse by saying, “We’re taking a raft?”
The man in the boat glared at me. “I was told only one passenger.”
The Lear jet burst over the line of palm trees and took off like an arrow toward the west. I followed it with my eyes. It seemed to be taking civilization with it, leaving me out here in a darkening world. “No,” I said, trying to sound confident. “I was told to go with you.”
“Well, then,” he said, “It is not a raft, my dear; a rigid inflatable boat. Observe: Eighteen feet of lovely Zodiac marine architecture with twin two hundred-horsepower Evinrudes. Gray, so m’lady can travel unseen on the night sea. Depth sounder, GPS, roll bar—”
“Roll bar?”
Calvin said, “It’s gorgeous. Man, would I like one of these for scuba.”
Focusing on my affront rather than Calvin’s compliments, Philemon glared at me anew. “We are not going to what you Yanks call an ice-cream social. Fish finder—”
“Fish finder?” I said.
“We may need to watch for your friends. I understand they are pinnipeds?”
“Pinnipeds?”
“SEALs, my ignorant darling. Will you step on board, please?”
I said, “You’re Philemon?”
He tightened his lips and showed me the whites of his eyes all the way around the irises. “Yes … and you are whom?”
“Em Hansen.”
“Well then, m’lady Em, this is your royal barge. Step aboard, please!”
I did as he said.
Philemon was dressed head to toe in black. He handed Calvin Wheat a similar set of clothes, and told him to put them on.
Calvin hurriedly climbed into them, and wound up having to roll up the sleeves and pant legs quite a bit. He accepted a dark hood, but put it into his pocket. He then stepped aboard the boat and helped himself to a life preserver. Clearly, Calvin Wheat was no stranger to boats.
I asked, “You’ve been to sea before? I mean, other than on that cruise ship?”
Calvin Wheat looked up at me as he adjusted his buoyancy vest. “I did my time in the Navy. That’s how I survived that fall. I was lucky enough to go through a school where they dropped us out of helicopters going twenty knots. You hit it right, you just bounce over the water.” For the first time since I’d met him, he smiled, but it was not a nice smile.
Philemon said, “Good man.”
“How’d you get ashore?” I asked.
“Just born lucky,” Calvin said. “I was treading water only half an hour when a sailboat came by. I’d been just trying to figure out how to inflate my pants and use them as a floatation device.”
Philemon said, “Lucky is the thing to be. I am glad to have you on my boat. Now, as for you … .” He turned to me. “Put this on. A bit big, but better a too-large BC than no BC,” he said, handing me another buoyancy vest. Then he shook his head. “You glow like the full moon.” He opened a locker under a seat in the boat and pulled out a dark poncho. “Tie it around the middle with this bungee. Not in style, but it will have to do. Now, here are the rules: You sit in the bow and hold on tight to the lifelines. I need your weight as far forward as you can get it. Yes, like that.” He stepped back behind a console that held a steering wheel and an instrument array and sat down in a long saddle behind the wheel, which looked like it had been lifted from a large motorcycle, and started the engine. Calvin uncleated the lines that held us to the dock and then took a seat in the stern. Philemon’s face suddenly split with a devilish grin. “And we go!” he said, thrusting forward the throttle.
The boat all but stood on its stern. It took off like a bullet. With a sickening drop, it slapped back onto the water, having raised and dropped me eight or ten feet in as many seconds.
The wind and water rushed at my face as the boat charged over the chop. I felt dizzy with the rush. “Philemon!” I hollered, uncertain he could hear me over the roar of the engines. “What’s the plan?”
“Your friends have gone ahead, and they have invited us to join their party. Very kind of them. I love a good party!”
“I hardly think this a festive occasion!” I shouted.
“Oh no? You think it’s nice that bad boys come to my islands and do naughty things? Nonsense!”
“Philemon, do you have any idea what you’re getting into here? I mean this could get quite violent.”
He howled with mirth and goosed the throttle farther open. “Emily! You are talking to a former member of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines! Special Boat Service at your command!”
Calvin Wheat said, “Special Boat! Cool!”
I said a silent prayer that whatever Special Boat Service was included the proper handling of a speeding whatever the hell he’d said this was. “So you’re a former military guy.”
Philemon said, “Since my ‘retirement’ you might call me by
another name … a consultant!” He roared with laughter. “I do jobs that require discretion; for a price, but this one I do for the brotherhood. My American friends want help cleansing filth from my waters? Philemon is their man!”
The brotherhood. There it was again, a sense of belonging that stretched around the globe, so close at hand and yet a thing beyond an insurmountable gulf. I changed the subject. “Are we far from the island?”
“Thirty miles. Not far. The cay you wish to visit is privately owned, just like Sir Edward’s,” he said.
Sir Edward’s? Leave it to Faye … .
“Will this boat get us there and back?” I shouted, glad that the noise of the engines covered the panicked squeak that was finding its way into my voice. “I mean, it doesn’t seem very large!”
Philemon threw back his head and cackled. “Special Boat Service! Our motto: ‘Not By Strength, By Guile!’ But this boat has muscles. Observe!” He pressed the throttle even farther. The boat skipped like a stone over the tips of the waves.
“Calvin,” I said, “what’s the plastic bag for?”
Calvin Wheat grinned, his white teeth going pink in the dying sunset. “After I douse the germs with bleach, I’m going to liberate the lab journal,” he said. “I figure I can still make it to Barbados and give my talk. Imagine the look on Chip Hiller’s face when I slap that thing onto the opaque projector and show the whole goddamned profession where he’s been getting his funding and what he’s been doing to get it! Revenge doesn’t get any sweeter than that!”
I fell silent and endured the slamming ride. The poncho whipped, and the air whisked around me full of salt spray, buffeting my hair into my face in great tangling locks. I held on tight to the lines and tried not to think of where I was or what I was doing. It was getting dark. I wondered idly if it would be worse or better when I couldn’t see what was going on around me. “What are we going to do when we get there?” I asked.
“We? I am going to take Dr. Wheat ashore. Then, because you have been kind enough to join us, I am going to join the party. You are going to drive this boat,” he said, working his lips about his grin. “In your American bank robbery films, you are the gun moll, the getaway.”
I decided that I must have heard him wrong. I turned and faced forward. Ate spray.
Ten minutes passed, twenty, during which time Philemon opened gear bags and showed Calvin Wheat how to handle an apparatus called a rebreather. It was apparently like a scuba arrangement, except that it had only a very small tank and created minimal bubbles. He set him up with a mask and fins. Apparently, they intended to approach the island without being seen.
As it grew dark enough that I could no longer discern all the features on Philemon’s face, he said, “It is time for your lesson.”
“Lesson?”
“You have a way of repeating things.” He cut the throttle suddenly to an idle. “Come here. I am going to teach you to pilot this boat.”
“Me?”
Calvin Wheat laughed.
Philemon said, “You. What are you, nothing else than ballast?”
“But I—”
“It seems your friend Mr. Latimer has greater faith in you than you have in yourself. He says he’s seen you ride a horse at a gallop. This is nothing after that. Come. You sit here in front of me.” He slid back and indicated that I should sit in the saddle in front of him.
Gingerly, I moved back, slowly taking in the surprising stability of the boat. I lowered myself into position.
He smelled of spices I could not discern, and rich ale. He grasped my right hand up into his and placed it on the throttle. My left hand he put on the wheel. “There,” he said. “Throttle in, and we go!”
The boat shot steep into the air, almost jumping onto its tail. I screamed, certain it would flip. It charged, leaped forward, and lowered itself into the wild skimming motion, at a steeper angle for the lack of my weight in the bow.
“There,” said Philemon. “We are planing. This switch here controls the angle of the props. You set it here if we are in very shallow water. Near the island, this will be a problem. You understand?”
“I … think so.” In fact, I understood only one thing. I was out in the middle of a darkening ocean. Worse yet, I was there with a very big, very strong man who spoke to me like I was an idiot. What else was I going to say but yes?
“Good. Now, give it a turn!” He cranked the wheel hard to the left. The boat roared to the left, leaning, leaning, kicking up, slapping the waves. He cranked it to the right. It looped around and did as he bade it. “Now you do it, m’lady Emily.” He pulled the throttle back to an idle and let go of the controls. The boat came to an abrupt halt.
I gripped the wheel. Pushed the throttle. The boat leaped wildly, roared into life, kicked up its bow, and bounced rhythmically over the waves. After a moment, the motion began to remind me of galloping a horse. I began to relax. I turned to the left, then to the right, feeling the rhythm shift with our angle to the wind and the waves.
“Ah, you are finding it,” said Philemon.
He gave me two more minutes’ practice then asked, “Where are we?”
I looked all around us and instantly the pleasure of the moment fell into a dungeon of anxiety. All I saw was a darkening soup of sea and sky. Low clouds were scudding in. My body contracted with an emotion I did not dare admit even to myself.
Philemon read my fear. “GPS, right here,” he said. He tapped the instrument. “Our position. This line is the path we have taken. Tap this button to find your way home. Miracles of modernity. You will be fine.”
“Are you telling me you won’t be going back with me?”
“I am teaching you that you are not lost. You may not know where anything else is, but you will know where you are.”
I smiled in spite of myself. He was thinking like a geologist. “Thank you, Philemon. When and how do we communicate with the others?”
“They are traveling under radio silence. Wait for a light signal. Three flashes, then two. When you see that signal, follow it in slowly, with the engines quiet, like this.” He demonstrated.
Calvin Wheat said, “Shit, that’s quiet.”
Philemon said, “Keep your voices down, please. As you approach the cay, watch the fish finder. We will come up beneath you. Our friends approached the island from the other side. If things do not go well, it is possible I will leave the cay with your friends in their boat, in which case they will radio to you when they are clear and you may leave. Here, use this ear bud to listen, just like your fools in the airports with their cellular telephones. Follow the GPS back to Sir Edward’s, and we will meet you there.”
“What if it goes the other way around, and they all need to come with you?”
Philemon put a hand on my shoulder. “Lady Emily, if this radio goes live before we’re off that cay, all hell has broken loose, and you run this boat up onto the beach if you have to. You hear me?”
“Yes.”
He gestured up ahead. “There,” he said. “That’s our cay. We approach from downwind. Dr. Wheat, are you ready? Very good. Lady Emily, tell me what your men look like. I have only spoken with your Mr. Latimer on the telephone.”
I described Tom, Brad, the taciturn Walt. “They have two more I haven’t met.”
“That will have to do,” he said. “Very good.” He stood up and took off his shirt and pants, revealing a layer of neoprene that fit like a cutoff pair of overalls. He quickly put on an equipment belt and loaded a large knife and two handguns, and attached a gear bag to it by a rope.
“How do you keep your pistols dry?” I asked.
“These weapons are designed to fire wet. We just open the bolt a tad to allow the water to flow from the barrel.” Philemon allowed himself a low chuckle. “Otherwise the weapon goes kapoohey!”
He produced a huge set of fins and put them on his feet, put a diving mask on his face, set its snorkel and his rebreather in position, and gave me a nod. He checked to make certain Calvin Wheat’
s gear was secured to his belt. Then he glided to a stop, engines off.
The cay owned by the cruise line was a long shadow to the east of us, barely discernable from the sleeping sky and ocean that held it in their embrace. Around it I could see several other small points of land and small dots with lights, presumably boats. The closest lay to the south, just off the next islet. Was that Jack? None of them were moving. “Can other boats see us?” I asked. Beyond the pale illumination of the screen, all was dark as pitch. I wondered what kind of boat Tom and the others were in. I wondered if they had rendezvoused with Jack. I tried not to wonder if Jack was even still alive.
Philemon said, “I think not. The larger yachts will have radar, but we are small. Besides, we were never here. This night never happened. You understand?”
“Yes.”
Calvin nodded. “When I get to Barbados, I’ll tell them I saw the lab journal floating by … .”
Philemon smiled. “That which floats may be all that’s left of this cay come daybreak. Ah, speaking of day …” He opened another locker under the saddle and produced a set of night-vision goggles that made the ones I had seen in the Everglades look like dime-store reading glasses. He rigged them on his head, changing its smooth, sculptural shape into something alien, inhuman. As the last light faded, he scanned the island. “Lady Emily,” he said. “Things get too bright on the island, you put these on. The intensifiers are designed to cut out to avoid overloading.”
I put the bud from the radio into my ear. It let out a small, thin static. Philemon set the speaker so that he and Calvin Wheat could listen, too.
It was so dark now that I could barely see my hand in front of my face. I heard Philemon in the stern. He whistled softly, barely a sigh escaping between his lips. Suddenly, the sound of the static shifted slightly, and Philemon went on the alert. “There,” he said. “Our signal. Dr. Wheat, after you.” And without saying good-bye, the two of them rolled over the side and slipped into the dark, shifting waters.
I was all alone in the boat, in the dark, surrounded by water.
Waves slapped at the hull. I tried to imagine the sound came from some other source; a cow slapping her tail at flies, perhaps, or my mother pouring Kool-Aid out of a jug at a family picnic. The thought made me feel my loneliness.
Killer Dust Page 30
