Renegade 22

by Lou Cameron

  “I understand. I read some books on first aid when I was young. I was planning, one summer, to be a nurse when I grew up.”

  He didn’t ask her what she now wanted to be when she grew up. He lifted one of Bowman’s eyelids and, yeah, it was concussion all right. The guy figured to be out of touch with the world for a few more hours at least. He told the redhead this and got back to his feet. She asked, “Who were those men who attacked poor Jim – Colombian spies?”

  He shrugged and said, “It could work more than one way. A waiter I had down as just a sullen dope-off may have overheard us discussing money—lots of money—and done what comes naturally to the underpaid. He ducked out awhile. So he may have told some local thugs about three rich tourists wandering through the fog well heeled.”

  “Oh, I thought poor Jim was attacked by spies.”

  “Poor Jim wasn’t the only one there. I said it worked more than one way. There’s an outside chance they were Colombian agents. They acted more like plain old thugs than paid assassins. But I did brush with a no-kidding spy working for somebody or other, back in Limón.”

  “Really? Oh, how exciting! What did he look like?”

  “Exciting. Try to remember what I said about keeping Bowman in bed, but don’t do it the naughty way. It could kill him. I’m going back on deck.”

  As he left, she asked him what he meant about keeping anyone in bed the naughty way. He didn’t answer. She couldn’t be that dumb, but she was spoken for, and, come to think of it, so was he. He was smiling wryly when he stepped out on deck and met Gaston. The Frenchman said, “I have been up in the bows. They have a baby deck gun left over from the Siege of the Alamo mounted there. What do you think about one of those Maxims in the hold instead, hein?”

  Captain Gringo said it was a good idea but that they’d better tell the skipper before they shifted any of her cargo. As they walked aft, Gaston asked, “What are you grinning about now? I observed the redhead traveling with that species of an idiot. But you weren’t with her long enough to smile so smugly.”

  The tall American said, “I’m not smug. I’m chagrined. Have you ever noticed how it never rains but it pours? How many shitty tramp schooners have we voyaged on without one decent lay to be found on board? So, okay, let a guy take a sea voyage with one great lay in sight, and presto, the devil shoves another likely prospect in his face.”

  Gaston shrugged and said, “I said I saw her. I agree the redhead looks trés easy as well as not bad. But if you want to pass on that formidable big Basque femme, I hope you’ll remember your friends, Dick!”

  Captain Gringo chuckled and said, “Down, boy. It wouldn’t work if I was willing to fix you up with Esperanza. But feel free about the redhead, if you want to try for it. No use both of us missing out on that.”

  Gaston sighed and said, “Alas, I fear they both regard me as a father figure, the poor young dears. Esperanza is young enough to be my daughter. Come to think of it, she could be. But the redhead could be my granddaughter, and even dirty old men must draw the line somewhere, non?”

  Then he brightened and added, “Perhaps there will be some dirty old women where we are going. One of the crewmen told me there is plenty of amour to be found at Laguna Chiriqui. He was bitching that some of it was old and ugly. Laguna Chiriqui sounds like my kind of town.”

  The sun burst through the overcast as they joined Esperanza once more on the poop. Captain Gringo told her he thought it might be a good idea to mount at least one machine gun fore and aft. Esperanza shook her head and said, “A good idea, querido, but not in my contract. My orders are that nothing leaves the hold until the rebels accept delivery. Perhaps that Bowman could give you permission, since he works for the people who hired us all, no?”

  Captain Gringo nodded, said he’d ask, and led Gaston away before the little Frenchman could say anything. Gaston asked, “How can we get Bowman’s permission to even piss in the hold if he is out like the light, hein?”

  “Easy. Guys suffering concussion say all sorts of things they might or might not remember later. You get the redhead out of the cabin some damned way and I’ll get permission to unlimber some guns from her knocked-out intended, right?”

  “Ah, trés bien. One forgets how sneaky you have become since you started traveling with a rogue like me.”

  So they went back to Bowman’s cabin, Gaston lured her out on deck so his comrade could examine her intended for possible injuries of an indelicate nature, and a few minutes later Captain Gringo rejoined them to say, “He’s only got that bump on the head. I think he’s starting to come to. At least he spoke to me just now.”

  Martha clapped her hands and said, “Oh, keeno! What did he say, Dick?”

  “Just a few words about security, before he passed out again. You’d better go back to him and hold his hand. He may wake up again, see?”

  She did. So the two soldiers of fortune went down to the hold and brought up a couple of Maxims and enough ammo to matter, making two trips.

  They mounted the first on the taffrail, explaining to Esperanza that he’d gotten permission from the semiconscious liaison officer, who apparently outranked them all. The trusting Esperanza didn’t question this. As Gaston had explained in the past, Basques never lied to a friend and so couldn’t imagine anyone they trusted even telling them a harmless fib.

  They were setting up the second machine gun in the bows when the schooner plowed through another fog bank, sailed out the other side, and almost crashed head-on into a bigger gunboat going the other way!

  All hell broke loose as everyone on both sides reacted by instinct without time to really think. Esperanza sprang to the helm in the stern of the Nombre Nada and swung the wheel hard over as someone on the bridge of the big armor-plated , gunboat did the same. The vessels passed at point-blank pistol range. So of course some slobs aboard the gunboat opened up with their small arms. A Colombian ensign fluttered from the jack staff of the gunboat, and, while the Nombre Nada flew no flag at all, the patrol-boat crew obviously knew who they were shooting at!

  They shot the Nombre Nada up indeed, though she was too close in for them to depress their more serious deck guns. Captain Gringo muttered, “Oh, shit,” and swung the Maxim muzzle toward the gunboat as Gaston shoved a belt in for him. The excitement had brought a whole mess of Colombian seamen out on deck by now. So when the tall American traversed said deck with a long burst of automatic fire, the results were grim for the Colombian navy.

  White-clad figures dropped and either writhed in agony or just lay still on the deck plates under the long line of bare steel spots Captain Gringo drew on the gray armor plate from stern to stem. Then he saw that the bows of the Nombre Nada we no longer at the right angle, leaped up, and ran the length of the schooner to man the taffrail gun and fire a long range raking burst into the gunboat as they entered another fog bank.

  As they did so, Esperanza shouted, “Reef all sails!” and signaled “full speed ahead” with her engine-room telegraph as she swung the wheel hard over again.

  Captain Gringo said, “Good thinking. When they get turned around they’ll come boiling with a bone in their teeth along your last known course. But how far are we from shore, Esperanza?”

  “How the fuck should I know, and who the fuck cares?”

  That sounded reasonable enough, when one considered the option of standing out to sea with a deep-draft gunboat in the neighborhood. So as Gaston joined them in the stem, Captain Gringo was putting another belt in the Maxim. The Frenchman cast a thoughtful glance over the rail and muttered, “I hate to be a spoilsport, but I can see sharks as well as adorable coral heads in that shallow water, Esperanza.”

  Before the big brunette at the helm could answer, the Nombre Nada ground to a shuddering stop as her keel cut into chalky coral. Gaston sighed and said, “See what I mean?” Esperanza said something dreadful in her own private language and signaled reversed engines. As they stared over the stem, the sea churned the color of watered milk, but the Nombre Nada did
n’t move.

  A crew member popped his head out a deck hatch and shouted. “We are taking on water, Captain Esperanza!” Esperanza shouted back, “Don’t stand there like an idiot, then. Start the fucking pumps!”

  As he dropped out of sight, Esperanza signaled the engine room to stop the useless screw, then turned to stare seaward into the fog, asking quietly, “Does anyone have any suggestions? The Nombre Nada and me are both stuck!”

  *

  The only thing that was getting better as the day got older was the visibility. The afternoon sun was beginning to burn off the fog at last, but that was no improvement to the people aboard the grounded schooner, with a gunboat patrolling somewhere near enough to matter!

  Esperanza’s almanac said the tide had to ebb farther before it rose again. So as the schooner began to rest even more of her tonnage on her keel, the seam she’d sprung kept leaking more by the minute.

  As of the moment, the Nombre Nada’s steam-powered bilge pumps were dealing with the leak okay. But to have steam power one had to burn oil, and, while the Nombre Nada’s long skinny smokestack wasn’t sending up a very big plume, any plume at all could be fatal if an unfriendly lookout spotted it on the rapidly clearing horizon. So Esperanza went below to see about damage control after sending her own lookout up the mainmast.

  Because of the increasing heat below decks, most of the others on board had gathered on deck, save for the unhappy engine-room gang and Esperanza’s damage-control party. The redhead steering the now more-or-less recovered Jim Bowman by one arm spotted Captain Gringo and Gaston in the stern and led her intended back to them, saying, “I did try to keep him comfy in bed, but it was so hot in there.”

  Bowman blinked owlishly at the soldiers of fortune and said, “Miss Pendergast told me what happened. So I guess I owe you guys. I’ll be damned if I can remember a thing after we were about to leave that hotel bar back there.”

  He spotted the Maxim mounted on the taffrail and added with a crown, “How dare you meddle with the arms shipment in my care! I have to account to El Criado Publico for every single round of ammo!”

  Captain Gringo said, “Martha, sit him down somewhere before he falls down on his own.” Then, as the redhead steered the skinny American over to a hatch cover, Captain Gringo told him, “We can account for every round pretty good. I just pumped a belt and a half of .30-30 into a Colombian gunboat. You told me it was okay. Don’t you remember?”

  Bowman sat down, shaking his head to clear it as he muttered, “No. I don’t even remember leaving that damned bar. How in hell could I have given you permission to break out that machine gun? I didn’t even know I was aboard until just now! Besides, I would have said no if I’d known what you were asking.”

  “It’s a good thing you were too groggy to know what you were saying, then. The arms and ammo in the hold are slated to fight Colombia, right? Okay. We just fought Colombia pretty good.”

  Bowman insisted, “You don’t understand. I’ve only been sent along as an observer and noncombatant liaison officer. My orders are not to take part in any fighting myself!”

  Gaston said, “Eh bien, should anyone ask, I shall bear witness that you were sleeping the sleep of the just when we saved your unconscious derriere from drowning or worse. Do you really imagine that gunboat crew would have made any distinctions, had they captured you and M’mselle Martha? Mais non, they would have hung you, at least, along with us, from their yardarm. The more attractive demoiselles traveling in our company would no doubt have taken longer to die.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Martha and I are American citizens!” The two soldiers of fortune just exchanged weary glances. There was no point in explaining to an idiot that a Colombian gunboat cruising illegally in Costa Rican waters had orders to play rough.

  Esperanza came back on deck carrying a shark billy in one hand and a gunnysack of bran and shredded rope in the other. She looked around, saw that the horizon was visible now, and said, “We located the leak. There is no hope of calking it from inside. But this stuff will swell as it’s sucked into the sprung seam.”

  Captain Gringo shook his head and said, “You can’t go over the side.”

  Martha Pendergast said, “He’s right, Señorita Esperanza. I think I saw a shark fin as we came out on deck just now.”

  Captain Gringo said, “You didn’t see a shark fin, unless you don’t pay much attention to your surroundings.”

  The redhead followed as Captain Gringo, Esperanza, and Gaston moved over to the rail. A formation of hammerheads was circling the grounded schooner like a Sioux war party. Martha said, “Oh, dear! How many of them are there?”

  Captain Gringo said, “One is too many, with hammerheads.”

  “Heavens, are they man-eaters?”

  “They eat women, too. Are you sure you can’t plug the leak from inside, Esperanza?”

  The big Basque brunette shook her head and said, “I tried. The water pressure simply shoots the calking back in my face. We have to calk that seam before the tide turns, Deek. The almanac promises a spring tide just after sunset. Meanwhile, the sun is shining and they say sharks seldom attack in broad daylight in clear water, no?”

  “What do the sharks say? Hammerheads may not know they’re sharks, anyway. They play to mixed reviews from pearl divers. Nobody knows why their heads are shaped so funny. But they obviously can’t have brains shaped the same as other sharks. Why don’t we wait until some mako or tiger sharks show up? That way we won’t have to guess at their intentions, see?”

  Esperanza smiled wanly but said, “That’s not funny. I’m going over the side.”

  “Oh, hell, give me the stuff and I’ll do it, doll.”

  “No, you won’t. In the first place, I’m the skipper. In the second, I know more about calking a seam than any handsome landlubber.”

  They saw that she meant it when she started kicking off her sandals. So Captain Gringo took off everything but his pants, emptied his pants pockets into his hat, and told Gaston to look after everything as he held out a hand and told Esperanza to give him the shark billy.

  She said, “Deek, it is foolish to risk two lives when I can make the repairs myself.”

  He took the billy from her anyway, asking, “Do you have eyes in the back of your head? We’d better use the boarding ladder. The less we splash, the better.”

  So they did, as everyone else on deck lined the rail, imploring them not to do it. The hammerheads made no comment as they lowered themselves into the clear tepid sea. As Captain Gringo ducked his head under and opened his eyes, they looked bigger, cruising with their sandpaper bellies just above the coral flats all around. Some smaller, darker pilot fish kept the hammerheads company. There were no other fish in sight. Fish were smarter than Esperanza about hammerheads, it would seem.

  Esperanza sank until she stood on the bottom with her back to Captain Gringo and the circling sharks and proceeded to shove handfuls of oakum against the bubbling open seam in the Nombre Nada’s hull. The bigger target guarding her curves with the pathetic shark billy was running out of air and wondering what to do about it when Esperanza kicked for the surface to inhale some for herself, with the repairs maybe one-quarter done. So he did, too. And when Esperanza went under again he followed.

  Their movements near the surface had been unavoidable, since neither had been born with gills. But one of the hammerheads came in to sniff them over, swinging its grotesque head from side to side in curiosity, rage, or whatever in hell went on inside a small flat cold-blooded brain. Captain Gringo got between it and Esperanza and raised the shark billy thoughtfully as he wondered where the hell one poked a hammerhead. The brute’s eyes were out on the wing like planes of its weird skull. Its gill slits were protected from frontal attack by the same hammer-shaped head.

  The shark apparently hadn’t figured him out, either. At the last moment it rolled on its side and veered away, almost scraping the tip of the billy with its long sinister belly. Captain Gringo resisted the impulse to poke it
in the guts. He knew he’d get mad as hell if someone did that to him.

  But up on deck Jim Bowman had risen to join Gaston at the rail. So as he spotted the same shark he drew his pistol from under his jacket. Gaston warned, “Mais non! You could empty that pistol into a shark without even slowing it down. But the splashing and blood in the water could trigger a feeding frenzy!”

  Below, Captain Gringo and Esperanza were blissfully unaware of the idiocy above them, but all too aware of the closing circle of sharks, and running out of air again. He followed her up, and as their heads broke water Esperanza gasped, “I think I can finish with one more dive.”

  He said, “You’d better,” and they went under again.

  As Esperanza went back to plugging the leak, the same hammerhead or its twin came around the stem, almost trailing a sneaky fin along the hull as it homed in on Esperanza this time. Captain Gringo kicked his own body between the girl and the hammerhead, and when he saw that it didn’t seem to want to veer away this time, he stiff-armed the head of the shark billy and let the shark ram its flat head into it. At the same time, a bullet spanged into the water close enough to damn near burst his ear drums.

  On deck, Gaston knocked Jim Bowman into the scuppers, drew his own gun, and said softly, “Stay right where you are or I’ll kill you! If I see blood in the water I’ll kill you anyway, hein?”

  Martha Pendergast dropped to her knees by Bowman to shield him as she protested, “You mustn’t hurt my Jim, you brute!”

  Gaston muttered, “Merde alors,” and looked over the side. He saw, to his considerable relief, that the bolder hammerhead had rejoined the Sioux circle to reconsider. Getting poked in the snout and stunned with gunfire had apparently informed its dim mind that whatever those funny things against the hull were, they weren’t the usual injured fish one had for supper around here.