The White Tigress

by Todd Merer

  “To Lucky,” said Dolores, lifting her glass.

  “To la vida salvaje,” said Javier.

  Salvage? “Al buen vino,” I said.

  We touched glasses.

  After dinner, Dolores disappeared into her war room, and Javi and I went up on the bridge, where we sipped Duke’s superior brandy—

  Suddenly, there was the growing roar of jet engines, and a moment later, two fighter jets flashed overhead, streaking shadows against the starry sky.

  “Chinese,” said Javier.

  “Auspicious,” I said.

  “Checking us out. Trying to figure out what’s going on. A month ago the only things here other than the old fishing shacks were a palm tree and some rocks, half a speck in the middle of one hundred seventy million square miles of water.”

  So Javier had been here before. And wanted me to know it.

  “No secrets, Benn. You’re like family to me.”

  “I felt that way about your brother.”

  “I’m not talking about Nacho.”

  I just looked at him.

  “Dolores,” he said.

  “I love her,” I said.

  “I know you do.” He poured another brandy and drank it in a swallow. “That’s why you’re going to save her.”

  “Sure. Benn, the Great Negotiator, to the rescue.”

  “Killing Richard’s the key. Sleep tight, blood.”

  I left Javier with the brandy and went into the electronics cabin. Dolores was at the computer, looking up at the big screen. The green cursor that was Kitty was now well within the gray arc, and at the arc’s center a blue ship-shaped image had now appeared.

  “Tell me that’s the American navy,” I said.

  “That’s Richard’s command.”

  “He’ll easily catch up to us.”

  “He won’t. He just wants us to lead him to Duke.”

  “And then what follows?”

  “You earn your pay.”

  CHAPTER 59

  That night I slept alone. Dolores wanted to keep tabs on Richard’s amphibious assault ship. In the morning, I found her slumped asleep at the computer. On the big screen, the gray ship was about a hundred miles away, unmoving. I woke Dolores gently. When her eyes opened, she seemed startled by my presence, but then she hugged me close.

  “Be right back,” she said, leaving.

  I waited, but she didn’t return.

  So I went out on deck.

  The atoll was humming. Even as I watched, three fast boats appeared from behind the old freighter and started toward us. As the first vessel neared, I realized the men crewing it weren’t Chinese but Dolores’s Logui. Made sense. By another name, the fast boats were called lanchas, the go-fasts that ply the Caribbean cocaine routes from Colombia and Venezuela to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. The Logui must have done their share of runs.

  But why the Chinese flag atop the hut? Was it one of Duke’s fake-out moves? Had Dolores known?

  But Dolores cheerfully cried, “Ahoy!”

  She had climbed partway up the mast above the flying bridge. The sun behind her formed a halo around her ink-black hair. Her silhouetted figure was a Greek goddess in alabaster. One elegant arm was pointed.

  I followed it to the third approaching go-fast.

  Three men on the boat. A mechanic at the triple outboards, a wheelman, and a man gripping the prow rail. All were sun-darkened. The mechanic and the driver looked like Filipinos but might have been Logui. But no mistaking the tall man on the prow.

  Duke.

  Barefooted, Dolores nimbly climbed down to the foredeck. As the fast boat came alongside, she leaped across open water onto it and embraced Duke. His sour face split in a smile. Dolores had expressed her disdain for Duke, so I perceived their familiarity as a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Not to mention that Dolores knew she could mold sour Duke like clay.

  Duke called out, “Benn. Javi. Come, I’ll give you the guided tour.”

  Laden with his video gear, Javi leaped onto the go-fast. I waited until it bobbed closer, then boarded the small craft one leg at a time.

  Duke’s laugh was raspy. “No sea legs, Benn?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Check my website.”

  Perched on the prow, her hair a black flag in the sea breeze, Dolores was dazzling in her white sarong. Dorothy Lamour, I thought. No, better. The go-fast took off, and I fell into a seat and held on as it made for the atoll.

  “The dredging is nearly done,” said Duke loudly over the engines’ roar. He looked better than when I’d seen him in New York. Maybe the ocean air. Maybe the action. He said, “According to my ground-penetrating radar, we’ve got two feet left to pay dirt.”

  Javi braced in a shooting position, videotaping the atoll.

  “Include the flag,” Dolores told her uncle. “Then do another version without it.”

  Always thinking, this one.

  Duke pointed his cane at the freighter anchored by the dredge. It was an old, sturdy vessel, its aft deck flap lowered, open to the water, nothing inside the cargo bay.

  “I figure maybe one more day,” said Duke.

  Go-fasts were buzzing between Kitty and the atoll. I spotted Derek and his Dragons in one, a pair of Logui in another—

  A sudden ear-splitting roar as another pair of fighters flashed by low overhead. I caught a glimpse of them: stubby crafts with overlarge intakes and short wings laden with missiles and fuel tanks.

  “Harriers,” said Duke. “Tough little birds.”

  “Richard’s,” said Dolores. “He’s just over the horizon. Close enough to fight from a distance, far enough for deniability.”

  Fight? Against the Chinese? Deniability?

  Impossible. The world’s infested with secret proxy wars, but direct combat between nuclear powers cannot be denied, much less concealed.

  We passed close by the dredge. It had already excavated an enormous pile of sand from the shallows, piling it high on the beach. Visible beneath the crystalline water, a fifty-yard square had been cut in the sea floor, maybe ten or fifteen feet deep. The bottom of the square was still thinly layered with sand. The excavation had partially exposed the geometric outline of something that lay below the sand. There are no straight lines in nature, so the hidden object had to be man-made.

  But what was it?

  We went ashore. Duke and Dolores remained with Javier, who was now busily videotaping the excavation. On the green ridge, the Filipinos and Logui were filling sandbags, setting up defensive positions against an assault from the sea. For a moment, I froze, seeing a squad of dun-uniformed, red-star-capped Chinese soldiers setting up machinery and electronics.

  Then I realized they were Derek and his Dragons. I was still digesting the implications when something else caught my attention:

  The go-fasts were being driven almost to the point of recklessness, but one was ever so slowly nosing onto the beach. A canopy covered those aboard. As the crew got out and secured the go-fast, it drifted in the current so that the sun was behind it, and I saw, clearly, the silhouettes of two passengers beneath the canopy.

  Even at a distance it was obvious that both were small and bent. Oldsters. The crew splashed back to the go-fast and transported one of the old people ashore in a sedan chair. It, too, was shaded, but the person within was silhouetted against the sun. A woman. Madame Soo? Had these two been inside the guarded cabin on Kitty? Another foursome transported the second passenger into another sedan chair. This time a puff of wind raised the curtain, and I glimpsed the passenger.

  He was a beyond-ancient Asian man so bent, he barely measured four feet tall. He wore an orange monklike robe fastened over one bony shoulder. His bald pate shone in the sun. Despite his age, his face was unlined and tranquil. For a moment, our gazes met, and I thought he smiled, a smile so radiantly benign, it made me smile in return.

  Then the curtain descended, and he was carried off.

  I stared after him, wondering, thinking, Monklike?


  And now I knew that I’d finally seen Lucky.

  CHAPTER 60

  The Logui, gleaming like wet seals, were diving in the dredged square, using handheld vacuums to gently excavate the submerged object. Gradually, it became clearer: a waterlogged old DC-3, lost in some forgotten mission. As I watched, the top of its fuselage was removed; its hold contained a time-darkened wooden crate, ordinary and insignificant.

  But obviously, Dolores and Javier thought otherwise.

  From the opened aft bay of the freighter, Javi videotaped the excavation, occasionally pausing for a still shot with the Leica hanging from his neck.

  By now, I’d become convinced that what lay beneath the sand somehow was—literally—of earth-shaking importance. In the glaring heat, I watched the excavation from the beach, feeling nutty as an Englishman in the noonday sun, waiting for the mystery to finally be revealed.

  I didn’t realize Duke was beside me until he spoke.

  “You’re not as dumb as you look, Counselor,” he said. “I must admit I was surprised when you busted me on my Golden Triangle days. Jesus, they were wild. There we were, in a jungle in the middle of nowhere, producing product that was changing life on the far side of the world. There was even a film, Panic in . . . ah . . . ?”

  “Panic in Needle Park,” I said. “The seventies. Al Pacino. No heroin in the streets.”

  “The seventies, yeah.” Duke laughed raspily. His eyes were pinpoints. Painkillers? Possibly. Despite his tan, up close, he looked awful: gaunt and worn.

  “What the H slowdown really was?” he said. “Me and Smitty took a break to set up new routes, get rid of some people the feds had turned.”

  Get rid of. The moron was owning up to murders, a crime that has no statute of prosecutorial limitation. Painkillers had transformed Duke from taciturn to loose-tongued.

  He laughed again, this time a high-pitched cackle. “The panic didn’t last long. We opened this amazing route through Vietnam. Shipped the product to the States inside GI coffins.”

  The same scam used by Harlem drugsters like the infamous Nicky Barnes. I felt like punching the son of a bitch. I had been in high school in the ’70s and watched the H epidemic destroy my friends and their families’ lives, those who’d survived the needless Nam sacrifices engineered by monsters like Nixon, Kissinger, McNamara, and Johnson. Bastards.

  Duke said, “In the eighties, we unleashed a freaking heroin blizzard. Man, those were the days.” He sighed happily at the memory, but then, strangely, his smile faded, his voice morose. “I’m going to go to hell, Benn.”

  I’ll meet you there, I thought.

  Duke said, “I was so greedy, I gave up the one woman I ever loved because I knew she wouldn’t tolerate my business.”

  I thought of my ex-wife, Mady. “I share your pain.”

  “But all good things come to an end. My business did when Richard came along.”

  I gave him a raise of the eyebrows but didn’t respond.

  “You must’ve been wondering why I told you about Lucky,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “In case I died, you’d know the real deal.”

  Right. Everything’s crystal clear, old man. Thanks so much.

  “Well . . . soon enough, it’ll all be over.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Read your bible. Armageddon.”

  “How about an eye for an eye?”

  He hesitated, said nothing.

  An eye for an eye. I’d verbalized a random thought, a stab in the dark, but struck a target. For Chrissake, I’d been looking for a mystery when all along it had been a romance novel. Uncle had drunkenly mentioned Ming and Kitty, emotion in his rheumy eyes. And Uncle had led to Stella, who led to Duke, who wrote love letters to Kitty. Lucky was a sideshow that would’ve been long forgotten had it not been for one-eyed, humped, old Ming Chan versus one-lunged, bent, old Marmaduke Mason, both vying for Madame Soo’s favor.

  Wind blew Duke’s hair behind him like the strands of a witch riding a turbocharged broom. I wondered which had come first: his evil or his insanity?

  I couldn’t bear his presence and distanced myself, walking along the shoreline. A stray wave washed across my boots. I took them off and laced them in a sling over my shoulders. The sun felt good on my pale feet. I unzipped the top of my bodysuit and let it hang from my waist, luxuriating in the soft wind cooling my sweaty body. I fought down an urge to go skinny-dipping. That option seemed off the charts of protocol, disrespectful even, for fifty yards from where I stood, something was happening that might evolve to a conflict that might plunge the earth into the fires of hell. As a wise man who built the first atomic bomb said upon gazing at the mushroom:

  Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.

  The sun was making me dizzy. In search of water, I trudged to the hut on the green ridge that crested the curved spine of the atoll.

  Derek and his Dragons had commandeered the old, tin-sided shack, which probably had been built by itinerant fishermen years ago. It was stifling hot inside, and they’d stripped down to their skivvies but were still sweat-sheened as they rushed about, fiddling with rat’s nests of wires and assorted doodads. Derek nodded at me and went on working. I drank a gallon of tepid water, and my senses cleared. It seemed to me they’d already set up and accomplished what they’d intended, and now were disassembling.

  “We’re leaving?” I asked.

  “Few more things, then we’re out of here,” said Derek. He glanced at his watch. “Speaking of which, the time has come.”

  “Time for what?”

  He didn’t reply. Instead, he donned earphones and opened a laptop and ran his fingers over the keys like a virtuoso. He waited a moment as if listening, then grinned as numbered grids ran down the screen.

  “One down,” Derek read aloud. “The Chinese naval authorities have been advised by their own security—”

  A Dragon laughed. “The Bureau of Green Dragons.”

  “That the meet is confirmed as two hundred miles due west of here,” Derek said. “And now . . . the pièce de résistance.”

  Again, his fingers flew over the keys. “Done,” he said. “The Red communications are now jammed. Nothing goes in or out. We own the airwaves.”

  “For how long?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “They’re pretty good, so they should be back up and running in twenty-four hours. More than enough time for us to declare mission accomplished.”

  I could only stare, trying to understand what he meant.

  “Still,” he said, “we’re cutting it pretty close, as it is.”

  As I wandered back to the dredged area, I saw that Kitty was under way, leaving the atoll. An American flag fluttered at her stern. I thought that Duke was probably aboard, but then I saw him nearby, watching Kitty leave.

  A platform had been erected on the beach; atop it, a tarp shaded two people: Madame Soo and the old monk I now knew was Lucky. They watched the excavation intently. The submerged crate had been excavated from the plane and now hung within a steel net dangling from the boomed ship, sand and water dripping from its barnacled sides.

  It looked awfully heavy. Tons heavy.

  Javier was videoing the process. Dolores stood at his side, wearing an expression I’d never seen before. Anxiety.

  Dripping seaweed, the box slowly crossed from its watery pit to the stern of the old freighter. The back flap remained open on the freighter’s stern deck, and the crate slowly lowered through the opening, coming to rest atop a grid of steel rollers in the cargo bay. When the crate was leveled, the Filipinos lashed it in place. Ten feet from where it sat, beneath the open flap, was the faded name of the freighter:

  The White Rose.

  Karma. Before I’d sidled into lawyering, I’d toyed with becoming a screenwriter. I was in awe of the classic black-and-white action films of earlier times, not just war flicks but adventures like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Bogey and based on a book by a m
ysterious Norwegian living in Mexico—his pen name was B. Traven—who scribed odes to the victims of unbridled, unregulated capitalism. Traven was dead, but I’d tracked down his widow in Mexico City—Mexico being safe in those days—and tried to persuade her to sell me a film option for another Traven book, The Death Ship. Turned out it had already been optioned, but we struck a deal for another book, The White Rose. Cost me $5,000, which at the time was every penny I had. Nothing ever came of it but fixed in my memory was her parting remark. Pointing at a marble bust of her late husband—a resolute-looking dude if ever there was one—the widow had said, “You look like him.”

  Over the years, I’d often speculated: What if I’d become a writer?

  Another speculation: Kitty having departed, The White Rose was going to transport us from the atoll. Would it be my death ship after all?

  As if in response, there came a sudden roar. A Chinese fighter whooshed by low overhead, circled, then made another, lower pass.

  Duke said. “They’re still wondering why they weren’t alerted to any presence here. Keep your asshole tight, Counselor.”

  “Shut up,” said Dolores. “Let’s move.”

  The White Rose’s foghorn sounded, and move everyone did. Madame Soo and the old monk were helped from their platform onto The White Rose, whose engines coughed to life. The Filipinos were casting off when the foghorn blew again, and the engines stopped.

  What now? I wondered.

  I soon found out.

  A Chinese patrol boat was fast approaching.

  Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water . . .

  Derek and the Dragons were putting their Chinese uniforms back on. Dolores was no longer in sight. The captain lowered the gangplank. I positioned myself atop it. Dolores had been right. The time had come for me to earn my money.