Point of Honor

by Maurice Medland

  Luis Alvarez stood in the bathroom with the door open, noisily urinating in the stainless-steel toilet. “Makes no never mind to me,” he said over the noise. He stepped out into the stateroom and started to button his fly. “Hey, Tobin, come here.”

  “What do you want?”

  Alvarez stuck his index finger out. “Pull my finger.”

  “Why?”

  “Just pull it. Hurry.”

  Tobin reached for his finger hesitantly and pulled on it.

  Alvarez raised his leg, grimaced, and broke wind. “Thanks.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Tobin said.

  “Oh, yeah?” Alvarez said. He tossed his life jacket on the other bed. “Well, I’ll show you something that ain’t.” He unbuttoned his shirt.

  “What are you doing?”

  The seaman reached inside his blue chambray shirt and slowly retrieved the sheaf of $100 bills he had taken from the vault.

  Tobin gaped at the orange currency band. “What is it, play money?”

  “Play money, my ass.” Alvarez riffled the bills under Tobin’s nose. “Smell it.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “No, I wouldn’t like to know,” Tobin said. “Money is the root of all evil. It says so in the Bible.”

  “Whoever wrote that didn’t grow up in East LA.”

  “Don’t blaspheme,” Tobin said. “Look, I don’t know where you got that, but you’d better turn it over to the lieutenant.”

  “I’ll be damned. And you better not say anything, either.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that. I’m a petty officer.”

  “Big deal. Third class.”

  “You can’t just take money like that. I’ll have to turn you in. It’s my duty.”

  “Look, don’t be a jerk-off. There’s boxes of this stuff down there in the number three hold. Enough money down there to live like a king for the rest of your life, and your kids’ lives, and their kids’.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “What do you think I’m saying?” Alvarez pulled his bosun’s knife from its sheath and began ripping the seams out of the lining of his foul-weather jacket. “This little package right here is ten grand. I figure we can stuff about twenty-five of these inside our jackets. That’s $250,000. One-quarter of a million bucks. Each.”

  “You mean steal it? We can’t just take it. That’s illegal.”

  “Illegal? How do you think they got it?”

  “I don’t care how they got it,” Tobin said. “I’m not going to have any part of this theft.”

  “Look, you’re a preacher, ain’t you? If you don’t want it for yourself, you could use it for your church. I’ll bet that little church back in . . .”

  “Fort Wayne.”

  “Yeah, Fort Wayne, I’ll bet they’ve never seen that much money in their lives. You could be the big man back there. Hell, you could probably buy the damn thing.”

  “Don’t talk like that. You can’t buy a church.”

  “The hell you can’t. You got enough money you can buy anything.”

  “That’s stealing. The Lord doesn’t want that kind of money.”

  “Oh, hell, it’s drug money. God would probably like to see it recycled to the church. Think what you could do with it.”

  Tobin shook his head. “Not that kind of money.”

  “Well, you can suit yourself, but I’m going down with or without you. That frigate will probably be here tomorrow. Tonight is the only chance we’ll have and I ain’t going to pass it up. I told you about it because I’d like to have someone to cover my back, just in case, but I’m going, just the same. And you ain’t going to say nothing to nobody.”

  “The lieutenant ordered us to stay in our staterooms. You heard what he said about someone being aboard.”

  “Ain’t you figured that out yet? He’s sweet on Kelly. He’s just covering up for her losing the radio.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “We searched the ship high and low didn’t we? Did we find anything? Yeah, we find a kid hiding out. Well, if we could find a kid, we could find anyone else who was hiding, right? And did we? Hell no. There ain’t nobody else aboard.”

  “I’m ordering you not to go.”

  Alvarez ran his thumb across the blade of his bosun’s knife. “You ain’t ordering me to do nothing. For that kind of jack, I’d shift your gears.” He made a motion of sticking the knife in and moving it up, over and up again, like shifting the gears on a car. “I’ve done it before for a lot less, don’t think I haven’t.” He pulled his foul-weather jacket on and zipped it up. “I’ll be back in a little bit.” He opened the door and looked back over his shoulder. “Just remember. You ain’t saying nothing to nobody.”

  John Sparks sat in his stateroom and cursed the ten-by-twelve-foot cell that held him prisoner. This ship was trouble; he’d known it when he’d first laid eyes on it, wallowing on the horizon like a fat old whore. And Kelly, the dumb cunt, losing the fucking radio. What the hell were women doing on ships in the first place? He rubbed his palms. He wanted a drink. Wanted, hell. Needed. He could make it from liberty to liberty on the Carlyle without a drink, but he’d never been in this kind of mess before. He needed a drink, and he needed it now.

  He liked the Navy okay, but he hadn’t counted on this situation. He’d made the Navy a career for a very practical reason: It was the only place he could practice his hobby easily and safely. He’d discovered during his first enlistment that the sea ports of the world contained brothels with access, for a price, to lovely young nymphets. Sparks didn’t consider himself to be abnormal in the least; he never asked for girls younger than fourteen or so. A few had been younger than that, but it wasn’t his fault. Language barriers sometimes got in the way.

  Age was all relative anyway. In the underdeveloped countries, girls tended to reach puberty quickly. And as far as Sparks was concerned, if they functioned like women, they were women. He lay back on the bed, irritated that he had to defend himself. Whose goddamn business was it anyway? There was nothing wrong with what he did. In fact, it was a good deal; everyone got exactly what they wanted. When he thought about it, he was actually a savior, dispensing greenback dollars, hard currency, to those less fortunate than himself.

  The sounds of laughter filtered through the walls. He cocked his head and listened to the faint murmuring of the girlish prattle coming through the thin bulkhead that separated the passenger compartments. He could tell that the lieutenant was pissed off at him for ducking into the room behind the girls. Fuck him. Officers were always uptight about something. You couldn’t please the bastards. Like stepfathers. Beat hell out of you for nothing. Anyway, what was the harm? He just wanted to be close to the girl, that’s all. What a little beauty she was. He wished he’d been the one to find her, all alone in that bosun’s locker they said she was hiding in, huddled under a blanket. He forced himself to sit up and think about something else.

  He glanced around the room and rubbed the sweaty palms of his hands against his dungarees. Christ, what he wouldn’t give for a drink. It was becoming impossible to think about anything else, even the girl. He looked again at the mahogany cabinet in the corner of the room. It looked like a minibar, but he hadn’t bothered to check it out. Now, in desperation, he dropped down on his hands and knees and pulled the sliding doors apart, exposing a dozen dark wells for holding liquor bottles. Empty wells. He bent down and peered inside, praying that some forgetful passenger from some bygone era had left something behind. Nothing but some old papers and crap littered around. He dropped his head in frustration and started to push up from the deck. Something made him do a double take. A dark form in the far corner of the cabinet, partially hidden by a crumpled paper bag, caught his eye. He groped into the darkness and curled his fingers around the familiar shape. His heart jumped. He tilted the bottle in the well and could tell by the feel it was nearly full. He withdrew it and stared, a smile of disbelie
f spreading across his face.

  It was a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label Scotch, covered with a gray film of who-knew-how-many decades. He wondered how long it had been mellowing in the dark little corner, gently rocking with the rhythm of the ship as it traversed the shipping lanes of the world. Sitting cross-legged on the deck, he twisted off the cap and held the bottle under his nose, breathing in the musky fragrance of blended Scots whiskey. He wet his lips, took a sip of the Scotch and held it in his mouth, swishing it around over his tongue, savoring the taste before letting it slide down his throat. It swirled down like the flush of a toilet, igniting a fiery glow in his belly that seemed to warm the entire cabin. It was the real thing. Sparks sat back and let out a long breath. He could feel his luck changing. Two great passions consumed his life: very old whiskey and very young girls, and he had expected to find neither aboard the Latin Star.

  He leaned back on the Persian carpet, nursing warm swallows of the Scotch, his head swaying against the gentle roll of the ship. The weather was quiet now. What was the big deal about getting this derelict under way? The Colombian frigate would be here in a day or so. The fucking lieutenant was grandstanding, playing the hero to Kelly and the girl. Let him play his games. Now that Sparks had a bottle, he could wait it all out. And all this crap about someone being aboard. They had searched the ship high and low and hadn’t found anyone but the girl. That was all crap, too, just Blake’s way of covering for Kelly.

  The whiskey warmed him. His thoughts returned to his last liberty. The Brazilian girls had cost him over a month’s pay, but they’d been worth it. They looked enough alike to be twins but weren’t related. One was thirteen the other fourteen, or so they’d been advertised. You could never be sure, but they were young all right, nymphets of unbelievable beauty who were available only to true connoisseurs with the right connections - and only then at great price. Sparks had been amazed that two so young could be so skilled in the art of pleasing a man. The warm glow of the Scotch enhanced the memory. He played it through again and again, savoring each detail until the fantasy began to dim from overuse.

  He heard the shower go on, the old pipes banging. He imagined Kelly and the girl in the shower together, laughing, giggling, playing grab-ass. He’d give a lot to see that. Not that he gave a shit about Kelly. She was too old for his taste. But the girl. Christ. He couldn’t get her out of his mind. He pictured her frail body impaled on his cock, the taut porcelain skin of her belly bulging out with each stroke, her dark eyes rolling in pain. He scanned the bulkhead, wondering if he could somehow fashion a peephole.

  The sounds of laughter coming through the walls were louder now. They were having a high old time next door. He rubbed his crotch and glanced around the cabin. There had to be a way to at least get a look. If he was going to do it, he had to do it now, before the shower went off. There were two brass portholes on the outboard bulkhead and a louvered air vent in the inboard bulkhead. The girls were in the forward cabin; there was an outside passageway on the other side of that air vent. Thoughts of what he might see through those louvers tantalized him. He clenched his eyes in an alcoholic fog, picturing them both nude. The warm glow of a fire began in his crotch, matching the fire in his belly.

  The lieutenant had come around earlier and told them again to stay in their staterooms, but that was just part of the show. If there was anyone else aboard, they would have found him after turning the ship upside down. He capped the bottle, unlocked his stateroom door and tiptoed down the dimly lit passageway, beyond the corner of the number two stateroom. He glanced around. The air vent was exactly where he thought it would be. He looked for something to stand on and found a portable fire hose on a large reel. He dragged it over, making as little noise as possible, and positioned it under the air vent. The shower was still running.

  He climbed up on the hose reel and quietly pried open the vent louvers with the screwdriver blade of his electrician’s knife. The light in the cabin was dim, but he could clearly see the canvas shower curtain waving gently before him. Where was the girl? Were they both in the shower? He glanced frantically around the cabin and spotted the top of the girl’s head sitting in a chair beneath the vent he was looking through, huddled under that damned blanket. Shit. He couldn’t let himself panic. Maybe she’d be next. He had a perfect view and settled down to wait for the show.

  After a few minutes, the shower went off. Sparks saw the towel that had been hanging over the curtain rod disappear into the shower. He heard Kelly singing a little song from behind the curtain. He wasn’t all that interested but hoped she wouldn’t dry herself completely in the damned shower. His fears were allayed when he saw a hand reach up and slide the curtain back. Sparks let out a gasp that he was sure she must have heard. His mouth went dry. His heart hammered in his ears. He had no idea she looked like that beneath those baggy dungarees. Her long legs were flawless, running smoothly up to the French-cut bikini tan lines. Her small patch of dark pubic hair was decorated with glistening drops of water. Her waist was tiny. Her breasts, although not large, were perfectly formed with firm, erect-looking nipples. With her olive skin, she looked like a statue he’d seen in a magazine once, part woman, part girl. The sight of her warm flesh amid all that cold steel stirred feelings in him he’d never felt for a grown woman before.

  He watched with watery eyes, transfixed, as she dried herself with the towel, the fire below his belt raging out of control. He imagined now that she was much younger, perhaps fourteen or so. Every movement was erotic, the little tune she was softly humming, a seductive siren song, like the sea nymphs he’d read about in Greek mythology who lured mariners to their deaths on the rocks surrounding their island.

  The hammering in his ears prevented him from hearing the faint rustle of clothing behind him. Too late, he felt the gentle breeze of a hand shooting out of the darkness, expertly covering his mouth and pinching off his nostrils in an airtight, unbreakable grip. The glands in his body were instantly thrown into a painful struggle to shift his body’s hierarchy of needs from sexual reproduction to survival. The struggle was mercifully brief. A sharp crack reverberated in his ears. He knew at once what it was. His neck had been snapped like a hickory branch. With a smooth continuity that made the two movements appear as one, he felt the stump of a knee against his back and heard the sickening tear of his spine being wrenched in two. A black-and-white film of his life played backward as his body slipped into a state of paralysis.

  Still alive, unable to move, unable to scream, he felt a hand pry open his mouth. A thumb and two fingers stretched out his tongue. He tasted the salt from the thick, sweating fingers first, then the acrid taste of cold steel in his mouth. He felt the blade glide under his tongue, scraping across his lower teeth, flooding his mouth with hot liquid.

  He slumped to the deck and stared up at the dark form hovering over him, unable to believe his eyes. He heard a faint wet plopping sound as something hit the steel deck beside him. His head rolled involuntarily over, and the small pink object came into focus. Through eyes glazed with shock, he stared at the neatly severed tongue. He thought it looked like a miniature version of the beef tongues he’d seen in butcher shops, except that his had a sickly green cast to it. He lay still, unable to control even his eyelids, and stared at the grisly lump until it faded from sight.

  Jorge Cordoba walked the short distance to the VIP bungalow with a spring in his step, despite an earlier feeling of exhaustion. With the discovery of the Latin Star, his energy level had bounced back to its normal driving exuberance. If he had lost points with Don Gallardo for his role in the disappearance of the ship, blameless though he felt he was, he would more than regain those points with its recovery.

  In the distance, mechanics worked under the blue-white glare of sodium-vapor lights to get the Blackhawk helicopters ready to fly at dawn. He paused when he heard the first one whine and cough and fire, warming up its engine. In a sliver of moonlight peeking through the trees, he glanced at his watch. It would be light in a
few hours. He breathed in the cool night air and let out a deep shudder of relief. It was only a matter of time before they retook the Latin Star, and with the recovery of the ship, he would be solidly in control again. Life would be back to normal, except that he would now be chief of finance, older and wiser from the experience.

  He could sense that things were starting to go his way. Everything pointed to it. The weather had improved significantly. The Latin Star had been found easily, located within twenty kilometers from the coordinates Admiral Cuartas had given them. The ship was dead in the water, drifting. That meant the crew had obviously heaved to and abandoned ship to escape the mudo. And that the mudo was probably still aboard. Good. He would make their job that much easier. By the time Enrique Lopez’s security people landed, the silent one would no doubt have disposed of at least some of the American boarding party. Jorge stretched and yawned. The feeling of relief that swept over him now removed the last barricade against the feeling of exhaustion he’d been fighting. Lopez had suggested that he get some sleep while his people boarded and secured the ship, and Jorge, for once, had not argued. He would be fresh and ready to board in the second wave, ready to take personal charge of the shipment from that point on.

  Jorge could feel the tension drain out of him as he paused at the door of the bungalow. He glanced over his shoulder and looked around. He would be glad to leave this place. A dusty, shithole of a town in the Huallaga Valley of eastern Peru, Campanilla lay on the main road skirting the eastern foothills of the Andes mountains, a five-minute march away from Punta Arenas, a Peruvian Army base which housed an anti-guerrilla battalion. The government of Peru and the base commander had differing ideas as to what their mission was. The Peruvian government had posted the battalion there to fight Maoist guerrillas of the Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, but the base commander, Colonel Julio Suarez, had found that it was more profitable to provide security for Don Gallardo’s shipments of crude cocaine paste being flown to Colombia and Ecuador for processing. At $5,000 U.S. per flight, the cost of security was high, but worth it. Jorge glanced around at the soldiers patrolling the perimeter of the compound. He turned the key and entered the bungalow.