Blood Tide

by Robert F. Jones

  “I’m afraid of you,” he whimpered, his voice slurred and staccato. It sounded like “Effredio.” Billy was just exulting in the fact that at last Kasim was talking English and had leaned in to give him a clout when Kasim suddenly stepped forward and kicked Billy square in the balls. As Billy buckled, Kasim pushed him over and kicked him again, in the ribs. “Are you afraida me!” he screamed. He got in a few more good boots before the guards pulled him off and clubbed him down.

  “Don’t kill him!” Billy yelled. One of the Tausuqs had drawn his bolo. The big Cebuano had a spear poised. “Later,” Billy told them. His voice was choked with pain. “Later, and slowly, slowly.”

  Fuck the commo! Billy would get this guy to talk and then, when he was pinned and bleeding on the cross, flay him inch by inch. The crowd would love it.

  Billy’s balls were still throbbing when the Cristos arrived. The screams and chants of the mob had reached a level of lunacy. Women were fainting, men ripping at their own faces until blood flowed, children dancing and pummeling one another dizzy, dogs howling and darting underfoot . . . a madhouse on a hilltop, under the noonday sun. The moriones—the mock centurions with their round, roached steel helmets and cuirasses and greaves and those horrible fright masks—came in for the worst of the crowd’s frenzy. Rotten fruit and dog turds bounced or splatted off their armor. Rocks clanked against their shields. Two of them broke from the circle guarding the Cristos and flailed the crowd with the flats of their swords, jabbed at its fringes with stiff, quick spearpoints that meant business. Men and women reeled away bleeding. A reek of pierced guts stung the air. The crowd retreated but redoubled its outcry.

  Torres saw the town doctor, drunk on rum and staggering, watch bleary-eyed as the first Cristo took the nails—this one was a volunteer. The others waited stoically, their shoulders and backs rivered with blood from the flogging. The hammer clanged. The crowd howled along with it. Kasim stood straight, chin up, among the waiting Cristos. He had had the worst of it, despite his short walk under the scourges. Ridges of torn flesh striped his upper body, his mouth drooled blood over his unshaven chin. But his eyes were clear. Clear and hard. Torres made his way through the crowd to Kasim’s front. Kasim watched him approach.

  “What do you have to tell me?” Billy asked.

  Kasim spat full in his face. Blood mainly, but plenty of saliva. Kasim was not frightened. No man could spit that much if he were scared.

  “Him next!” Torres ordered the moriones. “The dullest, rustiest nails you’ve got.”

  But he felt respect for this man now, felt it for the first time. The respect muted his rage. He wiped the spittle from his face and watched, fascinated. Two moriones threw Kasim down onto his heavy, blood-stained cross. Another spread his arms and held his hands down on the wood. A fourth approached with the heavy iron maul and a handful of spikes. Kasim stared up at him, grinning.

  “Cobarde,” he said happily to the morion with the hammer. “Moro cabrón. Maricónes, all of you. Sin cojónes! Come kill me, you big, fat, brave fairies.”

  The crowd roared louder than ever as the first of the crosses went up. The volunteer Cristo sagged against the nails and fainted. Someone in the crowd threw a bucket of water on him. He awoke briefly, then fainted again.

  “Jesús, Jesús, Jesús, Jesús . . .” The crowd began to chant in unison now. “El Salvador! El Salvador! Hijo de Dios! Jesús! Jesús Rey!”

  The morion with the hammer placed the first spike point on Kasim’s right palm. Kasim spit in his face. As the morion leaned back to wipe his face, another morion suddenly stabbed Kasim with his spear. It was the Cebuano. The spearpoint took Kasim in the chest—deep, to the bar of the crossguard—and the morion twisted it once, twice, thrice . . .

  Kasim heaved his back clear of the cross, against the spear’s thrust. His eyes went wide—focused on someone in the crowd. “Traidor!” he screamed.

  Billy spun to follow Kasim’s eyes. He looked amidst the crowd—red, wild-eyed faces; black, gaping mouths; yellow teeth, as yellow as a horse’s, snaggled and flashing over glistening wet tongues; tears and sweat running thick and fast down a screaming wall of faces. . . . And a priest standing there, watching Kasim. An old priest, white-haired, white-bearded, his mouth a grim line, his eyes hard and brown. Soldier’s eyes. A priest in a long black cassock. A priest making a cross in the air. A priest not sweating at all. Then a woman at the priest’s side grabbed his arm and with it pointed to Torres. It was Rosalinda.

  The crowd surged forward, knocking Billy sideways before he could move. The mob swarmed over the centurions, over the other Cristos, over Kasim, where he lay on his cross.

  By the time the centurions had beaten the crowd back, Kasim was dead. So was the Cebuano. Someone had ripped his Longinus mask so that it lay crooked on his face. A knife had entered the eyehole and remained buried, to the hilt, in the spearman’s face. A dozen bodies littered the hilltop, some still writhing.

  The priest was gone. So was Rosalinda.

  Curt was adrift on the South China Sea. Both Thunders were adrift, about a mile apart. There was water in the reserve gas drums. Now and then the two big engines would light off and run for a minute or two, but then—inevitably—they crapped out again. The batteries were growing weaker and weaker with each abortive start. And the sea was a mirror—practically windless, unbearably hot. What little wind there was came in cat’s-paws from the northeast, pushing them back toward Cambodia when it reached them, eating up what little gains they had made. He didn’t know whether to curse the breeze or bless it. When it blew, at least it provided momentary relief from the heat. The air was like wet, hot cotton wool, and the sun pounded down through it with a beat that stung his skin as sharply as any Portuguese man-o’-war would have.

  They’d made the pickup all right this time, no sweat—a floatplane load of opium bricks, well off the Thai coast. The sea’s calmness had been welcome then. Curt expected the roar of Phantoms every minute during the exchange. Of course, the Thunder engines had run beautifully during the trip across. It wasn’t until they were halfway back that the trouble began.

  Finally, though, after three straight hours of battery depletion, rising and crashing hopes, more curses in English, Spanish, and Tausuq than the South China Sea had heard in eons of seagoing horrors, Abdul had found a chamois cloth down in the forepeak. They emptied one drum of the polluted gasoline and were now slowly, painfully straining water-mixed gas from another drum into the only container they had—a leaky Igloo cooler. So far they had collected barely two gallons, half of which Abdul wanted to give to the other Thunder.

  “Fuck them, Abdul,” Curt told him. “Let them figure it out for themselves.”

  “No,” Abdul said.

  Curt’s head was reeling with the fumes he’d inhaled. His skin was on fire. He was about as strong as a soggy Kleenex. If only they could get under way, he’d be fine. Just fine.

  “I order you, Abdul. I’m the captain here. Let’s get going. Home.”

  “No,” Abdul said.

  “Goddamn it, Abdul. Do it!”

  “Fuck you, you infidel dog turd.”

  Curt went for a wrench.

  Abdul had it. He also had his bolo drawn. He started the Thunder’s engine and drove west, back to the other boat. They shared the gasoline. It lasted barely half an hour. Then they began to strain gasoline again.

  The sun did not seem to have moved an inch in the sky of molten brass.

  “He speared him to death?” Commodore Millikan’s voice, scratchy as it was over the ancient AN/PRC radiophone, came breathless with disbelief. “One of our guys speared him to death?”

  “That’s affirmative,” Billy said. “Over.”

  Though the Commodore insisted upon correct voice-radio procedure within his command, and had indeed docked men a week’s pay when they failed to comply, his own style on the airwaves was as sloppy as a civilian’s. That’s the way flag officers worked in this man’s navy.

  “Did you get anything
out of him?”

  “Just a kick in the nuts and a faceful of spit,” Billy said. “Over.”

  “Say again. Anything?”

  “Negative. Nothing. Nada. Zilch,” Billy said. “Over.”

  “Goddamn-it-to-hell, why not? Why’d the guy spear him? What—” His voice was momentarily lost in static.

  “The guard speared him because he was angry. Kasim made him very angry. Kasim would not break. Kasim would not talk. Kasim died right then. Over.”

  “Well, I’m very disappointed in you, Anvil Base. Very, very disappointed. Over.”

  “Armadillo, this is Anvil Base. You had to be there. Interrogative orders for me? Over.”

  Long crackling pause while the commo thought about it. Then the transmitter keyed again with a click and a roar like a full gale.

  “This is Armadillo. Just stand by at base until Anvils One and Two return. Any word from them? Over.”

  “That’s negatory. Over.”

  “Anvil Base, this is Armadillo. I assume that was you with the ‘negatory.’ The word is ‘negative.’ And use proper call signs from now on. Have you raised Anvils One and Two this channel? Over.”

  “I say again, that’s negatory.”

  “Goddamn-it-to-hell . . . well, raise them. Find out what the fuck’s taking them so fucking long. Then get Anvil One over here ASAP. You come with him. Out.”

  Billy flicked off the AN/PRC battery switch and returned to the lanai. He had three Thunders out searching for the priest and Rosalinda, a whole squad of Tausuqs scouring Lázaro City. He was damned if he’d tell the commo what he suspected. The asshole would only countermand his orders, chew him out for fucking up, go into an even worse tizzy than he was in already. Billy wouldn’t try to raise Curt on the radio, either. That would be stupid. Curt’s Thunder and the other boat were probably lying in pieces on the floor of the Gulf of Siam right now, blown to bits by more Phantoms. Good fucking riddance. Ever since that pissant boat bum showed up, there’d been nothing but trouble. Should have killed the fuck back there in Zambo, in the jai-alai court. But the commo didn’t want that. The commo. That was the wrong name for him. It ought to be commode.

  He laughed and poured himself a rum on the rocks. He deserved a drink. His balls still ached from Kasim’s kick. Tough little fucker, Kasim. Maybe he was a Moro after all.

  Out in the harbor and all along the Lázaran shore the evening paseo was shaping up. Pump boats and kumpits were returning to Lázaro City after a hard day at sea, fishing, shell diving, dynamiting the reefs, killing whatever helpless strangers happened to wander into view. The sun was over the yardarm now. The scene would continue all night. Billy had long since given up worrying about unchecked traffic. No way to control it anyway. As the commode said, Millikan Shipping was the entire Lázaran economy, every Lázaran’s friend, the source from which all blessings flowed. The commode. Yeah. Billy laughed and poured himself another drink.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “How do you like her, old man?” Sôbô beamed proudly, eyes flashing, as he pointed to the old hulk tied up alongside the mole. Culdee looked again. What he saw in the red wash of sunrise was a scruffy island trading vessel, a cut-down schooner that was probably quite lovely before her owners sawed off her masts and bowsprit. They hadn’t even squared them tidily. Ragged splinters spiked the stumps, gray and filthy, and a short, stubby foremast carried a sloppily furled gray canvas sail. The sail was poorly patched with mismatching dark swatches of fabric—hunks of old dungarees?—from which loose sail twine flapped in the dawn breeze. A crooked Charley Noble, soot black where it wasn’t rusty, jutted up from her engine compartment, its guy wires frayed and sprung. Bald truck tires served as fenders where she wallowed against the mole. A true tramp, all right, Culdee thought, a seagoing textbook of nautical sloth, all Irish pennants, green-crusted brightwork, oil-stained deck planking, and rust stains like dead blood striping her sides. She carried a big piece of deck cargo atop her aft hatch, covered with a scruffy black tarp.

  “What a piece of shit,” Culdee said. Miranda had come up beside him with Kasim. The name on the vessel’s stern read BLOEDIG-FEEKS, BALIKPAPAN, BORNEO.

  “You’d never recognize her for the trig little schooner that sailed in here just the other day,” Sôbô said, “would you?”

  “What schooner’s that?” Miranda asked. Then, as the truth struck her, she spun to face Sôbô. “Where’s Venganza? You said you were going to hide her in a safe place so her masts wouldn’t give us away to snoopers.”

  “No snooper would ever give her a second look now,” Sôbô said, beaming even more happily. “That’s Venganza, right there. And a damn fine job we did with her, if I say so myself.”

  “You bastard,” Culdee said. He balled his fists, and tears came to his eyes. Miranda felt herself reeling with the enormity of it. “Why the fuck . . .” Culdee was spluttering with rage.

  “Now, now, easy, both of you,” Sôbô said quickly. “She is not as she seems. That’s a disguise, and a damn clever one when you consider how limited our time was. My Nipponese crew has been working around the clock on this project. She’s a Q-boat now, your Venganza. A killer in tramp’s clothing.”

  “What’s a Q-boat?” Miranda asked.

  “During the war the Germans and Japs rigged beat-up old merchant ships with modern cannons, depth charges, machine guns, and new, strong engines,” Culdee said. “They’d lure our subs to the surface for an easy capture, then sink the poor fuckers unawares.” He recognized her now: the hulk the Japs had been working on down in the pens last night was Venganza, mutilated.

  “There’s no real harm done,” Sôbô said. “We pulled your masts with our crane and stowed them in the pens, then stuck these rotten stumps in. We also pulled your rather puny old Graymarine and replaced it with a brand-new four-hundred-horsepower 6V-53TI built by Detroit Diesel back in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Beautiful piece of machinery—a gift from some Japanese friends of ours in Honolulu. She’ll push along at ten knots or better now, thanks to some refinements we made below her waterline. That’ll put her at least in the same league as Millikan’s gunboat.” There were Japanese workmen still swarming over the hulk. Sôbô called to an older man in coveralls who was leaning on the after taffrail, wiping his hands on a wad of oily waste. The old man barked “Hai!” and swung down below, into the engine compartment.

  “Takahashi,” Sôbô said. “Damn fine man. My chief machinist on Yunagi, back in the good old bad old days.” He hummed a bit of “Chicago,” smiling wistfully. They heard the engine start up, a smooth, powerful, humming roar quite unlike the old auxiliary’s ragged rattle. Then a puff of sickly black exhaust belched from the Charley Noble.

  “That’s rotten-looking smoke,” Culdee said. “For a brand-new engine.”

  “More of the disguise,” Sôbô replied. “That’s false smoke, from a generator at the base of the stack. The real exhaust is voided at the waterline, aft. You can barely see it.” He pointed to the chugging bubbles and pale wisps of steam. “And it won’t attract Redeye missiles, either.”

  Miranda couldn’t look at the tramp any longer. She turned her back and stalked off the mole. But the more Culdee looked, the better he liked Sôbô’s notion. Damned clever tactic. That old stinkpot would draw fast boats, fat, dumb, and happy, like dead meat draws flies. Maybe even the gunboat, if Millikan was sucker enough.

  “What about firepower?” Culdee asked. “I sure don’t see any yet.”

  “Watch.” Sôbô called more orders to the Japanese workers. Four of them stripped the tattered black tarp off the deck cargo. Culdee laughed. Under the tarp was a long, gray-barreled naval rifle, bolted securely to the deck, with ammunition ready boxes close at hand.

  “What is she, a five-inch?” he asked.

  “Japanese 4.7-inch rifle,” Sôbô said. “Standard on the imperial navy’s earlier I-class submarines and the pre-Fubuki-class destroyers. Damned fine weapon. And this one’s weight, complete with the mount and all necessary ammunitio
n, just balances the weight of the new diesel. There’ll be heavy machine guns on her as well—those 13.2 and 7.7 millimeters. She rides a bit lower in the water, but that’s all right. She’s faster than she was before, and she outguns Millikan’s gunboat now.” Culdee laughed again with delight.

  Then Miranda walked back toward them, her heels thumping hard on the coral.

  “Look,” she said to Sôbô, “I don’t like any of this, and I want out of here. This is all a mistake. A lot of men have died already, horribly, and you’re planning to kill more. You’ve totally maimed a boat I worked long and hard to make seaworthy, a boat I love almost as much as I love Seamark. You say you’re doing all this to get my boat back for me. Well, I don’t want it back at that price. You’re just using me as cover, too, in a way, so that you can knock over this man Millikan’s piddling little dope empire and probably take it over yourself. I don’t even know what’s happening to Freddie, and he’s the best damned mate I ever had.” She looked at Culdee. “Yeah, and that includes you, too, Dad. You love all this war crap, I can tell just by looking at you now. Well, stay and die with these other saps, then. I dragged you up out of that lousy boozy gutter you’d found for yourself, wallowing there in self-pity and rum, uglier than this poor tramp here, and I made you back into a sailor. Now you want to be a naval hero and a killer as well. So, stay here and kill, or be killed, for all I care. I’m cutting out.”

  “I’ve got to stay here now,” Culdee said quietly. “I’ve got to kill Turner. Or Millikan—whatever his real name is. He killed my shipmates in North Vietnam.”

  “Look,” Sôbô said, “you don’t have to fight, Captain. I’d hoped to send you with young Kasim here”—he slapped the white-haired Moro’s thick shoulder—“to cut your boat out of that harbor tonight, under cover of our attacks. But he can do it alone, with a few of his men. Your boat will be back here sometime after dark. We can replenish her speedily—I have stores already marked and set aside—and have you on your way safely by midnight. With Samal crewmen to carry you as far as you wish. As for Venganza, as soon as we’ve defeated Millikan, my men will restore her to her original condition. Better than her original condition, in fact. The new diesel is my gift to you for your help so far. A new paint job will go with it, new rigging and new sails as well. I’ll send it after you, later, to do with as you see fit.” He stopped, standing erect and solemn in the land breeze.