Mexican Marauder (A Captain Gringo Adventure #16)

by Lou Cameron

  “Mi casa es su casa, Señor Ricardo. You will find no sponge in these waters. Some oysters and coral, perhaps. And turtles. Many turtles. My people and me are camped here to hunt turtles to make soup for rich Americanos. I am called Miguelito and all of us are Cristianos. Are you going to arrest us?”

  Captain Gringo shook his head. If old Miguelito didn’t know the British merchant ensign from the flag of Mexico, there was really no reason to educate him. Captain Gringo said, “No. It is not unlawful to hunt turtles. I just want to look around.”

  Miguelito nodded and said, “As I said, señor, mi casa es su casa. Follow me, par favor ”

  Captain Gringo told his boat crew to watch the gig, then followed Miguelito as he bulled through a wall of sea grape. On the far side, thanks to the shade of a palmetto, the chalky soil was weed-free. The natives had set up a primitive camp, with palmetto-thatched lean-tos around an open work space. The air was filled with flies and the God-awful stench of rancid turtle fat. A pile of big sea-turtle shells rotted, covered with flies, near a cannibal pot over a camp fire. The American visitor tried to ignore the disgusting conditions of the camp as he looked over its inhabitants. There were about a dozen men and four women. Only one of the women, actually a girl of about sixteen, escaped being ugly, and the young muchacha didn’t do a hell of a lot for him.

  Her figure was nice under her thin white cotton smock of flour sacking. Her face was okay but was smeared with wood ash and grease. She could have used a shampoo as well as a bath. Her long black hair looked like nesting bats had been eating in bed. Miguelito told him her name was Veronica. He hadn’t asked, but he nodded at her anyway, and she looked away sullenly.

  By the time he’d been introduced all around and invited to share some home-brewed pulque, Captain Gringo was really more interested in breathing air again. But he’d been raised politely and he knew the form. So, he sat on a log and let Veronica feed him a cup of dreadful pulque. He’d never really learned to like it when it came in a bottle. In a tin cup, with a fly doing the backstroke in it, he had to make a real effort. But he swallowed enough to be polite as he casually asked his hosts if they’d noticed any other “sportsmen” in the area.

  Miguelito said, “Hardly anyone ever comes out to these keys, señor. That is why there are so many turtles.”

  He turned to a big burly Mexican with a badly scarred face and asked, “Have you seen any sponge on the bottom around here, Alejandro?”

  Alejandro shook his head and said, “Not enough to bother with. Some few, in the lee of coral heads, where they can seek shelter against the current. Only hard things grow in these waters.”

  Captain Gringo thought the scars looked like they’d been made by shark teeth. He nodded pleasantly at Alejandro and asked, “Are you a diver, señor?”

  Alejandro shook his head and said, “No. It was a woman with a broken bottle and an evil disposition. But you can see the bottom out there as you search for turtles on a clear day. The water is not deep.”

  Captain Gringo had noticed that when they’d anchored in perhaps forty feet of water, mid-channel. He asked, “Do you catch the turtles on the surface, then?”

  Alejandro laughed and said, “We don’t catch them anywhere. We harpoon them. During the mating season they come up on the playas to lay eggs and make love. The rest of the time one must hunt them at sea. They spend most of their lives in the water.”

  Another Mexican, with a drunkard’s leer, said, “They even fuck in the water. I have seen them. Did you know a turtle has a cock much like a man’s?”

  Captain Gringo didn’t answer, and he didn’t look at any of the women. He finished his drink, spit out the fly, and said, “I must be getting back to my schooner. Is there anything we can do for you people, as long as we seem to be neighbors?”

  The Mexicans looked surprised. Alejandro asked, “Why and how can you help us, señor? Do you have turtles?”

  “No, but we could spare some matches, coffee, things like that.”

  “Do you take us for begging pobrecito Indios? By the beard of Christ, we came out here to kill turtles, not to seek charity!”

  Old Miguelito said, “Silencio, Alejandro! Can you not see the señor is trying to be simpatico?” He turned to the American and said, “We, too, wish to be good neighbors, señor. But, I assure you, we need nothing.”

  Captain Gringo nodded and got to his feet, and the old man escorted him back to the beach. They shook hands, and Captain Gringo went back to Nombre Nada in the gig.

  He joined Gaston on deck just as Carmichael and his crew were returning from, their surface scout. Carmichael held up his black-lined wooden box with the glass pane in one end and said, “Duck soup! The cable is running in plain sight across the coral flats, and we can splice into it anywhere. I’ll just slip into my diving outfit, and my part of the mission will be over before noon!”

  Carmichael and his helpers went below to haul out the stuff they’d need, as Captain Gringo filled Gaston in on the Mexican turtle hunters. Gaston nodded and said, “Eh bien, if the Mexican navy took a serious interest in this area, you would not find peon poachers here.”

  “Poachers, Gaston? I didn’t think turtle hunting was illegal.”

  “It’s not, if you cross the gypsy’s palm with silver. Diaz has a tax on turtles, sponge, pearls, or anything that can be easily taxed. Did they show you a federate fishing license? Of course not. As I said, it’s a good sign. It means these keys are not patrolled often.”

  Carmichael and his men dragged the diving gear out on deck. Others, including the two girls, naturally came out to watch as they made the Scot ready to walk the bottom. Captain Gringo had been down in a hard hat a couple of times. The last time had almost killed him. So, he was able to follow their moves-as they got Carmichael suited up and screwed the brass helmet in place. His crew was good. Even the surly Rice seemed to know what he was doing as he set up the boxy air compressor and checked the valves. The compressor was run by hand. A wheel the size of a bike wheel, albeit cast iron and heavier, had to be spun by hand to work, the simple air pumps, two of them, inside the box. Naturally, the rubber hose air line ran from the top of Carmichael’s helmet to the pumps. Right now he had the air line coiled over one canvas-covered arm like a cowhand’s throw rope, so he could pay it out as he moved across the bottom. The lifeline, simply a stout manila rope like a cowhand really would use, worked the other way. It was attached to the harness of Carmichael’s suit, but the coils lay on the deck. His helpers topside would pay it out to him as he moved on the bottom, signaling with jerks when he wanted more or, if he jerked hard thrice, wanted to be hauled in pronto.

  The diver’s boots were lead soled. He had other lead weights in the canvas pockets of his web belt. Once filled with air, the suit would float if it wasn’t ballasted.

  Carmichael got unsteadily to his feet in the clumsy suit, closed the glass port of his helmet, and signaled Rice, who started pumping at once. The suit ballooned, making the diver look even more clumsy. Two men helped him to the ladder running down Nombre Nada’s side. Carmichael waved and proceeded down it with no further ceremony, as bubbly Phoebe called out to be careful.

  Gaston didn’t call out. He knew that with the vent of his helmet hissing like that, Carmichael couldn’t hear too well. But he looked around as he muttered, “Sacre, everyone is in such a hurry! I would have made sure there were no sharks before I skipped so lightly overboard!”

  Captain Gringo frowned but didn’t say anything. He hadn’t spotted any fins cruising the channel on his own scouting expedition, and obviously Carmichael and his men hadn’t. The guy had a knife strapped to one leg and a whole tool kit strapped to his chest.

  As he got waist deep in the calm water, one of the British technicians handed down the end of the thick insulated wire Carmichael was supposed to tap the cable with. Carmichael wrapped a couple of turns of it around his free arm and vanished below the surface for a moment. But then, as they leaned over, they could see his bubble plume and ev
en see Carmichael as he dropped slowly to the white bottom. He landed in a cloud of coral silt, got his bearings, and slowly plodded out of sight, as Captain Gringo turned to one of the men paying out his lifeline to ask how far the cable was. The man said it was less than a quarter mile. Captain Gringo wondered why Carmichael had chosen to do it the hard way. If it had been he down there, Captain Gringo would have moved Nombre Nada right over the damned cable.

  He lit a smoke and put a foot up on the bulwarks as he watched the bubbles breaking the surface farther and farther away. Flora joined him. She whispered, “Dick, do you think anyone knows?”

  He frowned down at her and said, “About what? Us? I haven’t been bragging in the forecastle. Have you?”

  “No, but I’ve gotten some odd looks.”

  “Don’t look odd, then. Pretty dames always get looked at. Can we save that for later, honey? I’m kind of busy right now.”

  She whispered, “You know what I’m saving for you, you brute. I can hardly wait for the sun to go down again.”

  “Right. Meanwhile, it’s up, and I’m watching for fins.” He looked up and called, “Lookout! Can you see Lieutenant Carmichael from up there?”

  No answer. He frowned and asked Gaston, “Hey, Gaston, who the hell’s supposed to be up in the shrouds right now?”

  Gaston looked blank. Captain Gringo cursed and said, “Right, ask a stupid question and you get a stupid old man staring back at you!” He turned, spotted a sailor who didn’t seem to be doing anything important, and snapped, “You, Collins, up the main mast, and yell a lot if you see anything but the lieutenant on the bottom!”

  Collins aye-ayed him and started up the shrouds. But before he got to the top, other things started to go wrong.

  The Welshman, Rice, yelled, “Haul him in, look you! The pressure’s gone, you see!”

  Rice spun his pump wheel harder, face ashen, as, out on the water, Carmichael’s severed hose popped to the surface and lashed around like a headless snake hissing air from its still-living lungs!

  The linemen started hauling in hand over hand as, out on the wafer, a dark triangle broke the surface, moved a few paces slowly, then sank out of sight again. Captain Gringo whipped out his .38 and fired, of course, but even if the sonofabitch had stayed on the surface it was just out of range. The revolver slug splashed uselessly, well short.

  Captain Gringo moved to help the linemen. But he saw that he’d only be in the way. They knew what they were doing, and they were doing it as fast as was humanly possible. It still took forever before they saw Carmichael’s limp form at the end of the line below. Captain Gringo grabbed a length of line, hooped it over his shoulder, and plowed across the deck with it to help haul the dead weight out of the water.

  It was literally dead weight. As they stretched Carmichael’s limp form on the deck and removed his brass helmet, the water inside ran out over his calm, waxy features. It helped wash the vomit away. But it didn’t help Carmichael. He had drowned.

  By this time, Rice had stopped pumping and had hauled in the severed air line. As Captain Gringo joined him, the Welshman held up the end and said, “Bitten through clean as a whistle, look you! The creature must have had teeth like shears!”

  Captain Gringo nodded and said, “Yeah. Are any of you other guys divers?”

  Rice looked even more upset and replied, “Divers? Of course none of us are divers! Lieutenant Carmichael was the diver, you see!”

  Gaston joined them, saying, “Eh bien, it is over. Without a tap attached to that mysterious cable, all we can accomplish by staying here now is to offer ourselves for target practice. I would say the mission is over, Dick. Would not you?”

  Captain Gringo shook his head and said, “No. I’m not the diver Carmichael was. But I have been down. Rice, we seem to have recovered everything in good enough shape to fix. I’m still going to need your help, though. This isn’t the gear I’m used to. So you and the others are going to have to show me the ropes.”

  Rice looked surprised. Captain Gringo nodded and said, “Yeah, I don’t like you much, either. Are you willing to shake and forget it?”

  The Welshman held out his hand uncertainly and said, “I’m surprised you feel you can trust me, Yank.”

  “So am I. That’s the most complicated thing about my business. I wind up having to trust the damnedest people. Come on, Gaston. We have to get this show on the road.”

  As they moved to rejoin the group around the dead diver, Flora was holding Carmichael’s head in her lap, as if that were going to do him a bit of good. Blond Phoebe asked, “Are we going to bury him at sea, like the others, Dick?”

  He shook his head and said, “Not for now. Not until we reach deeper water and away from the friendly neighborhood sharks.”

  Gaston said, “This idiot is going to try and take Carmichael’s place. Can’t one of you help me talk him out of it?”

  Both girls started to, of course, and some of the men in the crew seemed to think he was nuts. One of the linemen said, “The lieutenant was one of the best. If he couldn’t do it, you can’t do it, Yank!”

  Captain Gringo said, “Yeah. Get him out of that suit, dry it out, and splice the air hose. Better yet, since it was severed close to the helmet, just trim the end and reattach it. That ought to hold.”

  “Do you have any notion of the risk you’ll be taking, Yank?”

  “Probably not. That’s why I intend to take it. Let’s get cracking.”

  *

  Captain Gringo planned his dive for that afternoon, in the heat of the day. For one thing, the suit would, be dry, the light on the bottom would be better, and the sharks would be as calmed down as they ever got around here. For another, he needed time to study the problem. There was no sense in leaping overboard and hoping for the best unless he had some idea what the hell he was supposed to do down there.

  His first move was to study the charts and move Nombre Nada right over the cable. That didn’t take long. But as he really studied the situation for the first time, he wasn’t sure it made sense, either. He told the British bos’n, Clarke, “I’d have strung that cable farther north if I’d been asked to do it.”

  Clarke shrugged and said, “I would have too, sir. But they didn’t ask you or me. British Intelligence told us it would be here. We found it here. So, why worry about what the Spanish or Mexican cable crews had in mind when they laid it on the sea bed?”

  “I worry a lot about the Mexicans and Spanish, Clarke. They keep trying to kill me. Okay, we have the cable under our keel. We’ll find out why once we listen in.”

  He took Flora and her tapping crew aside and asked to be filled in more on just how one tapped an undersea cable. A vapid young man who looked almost as feminine as Flora explained that you didn’t actually cut in to the main cable. He said, “You wrap the end of our tap around it to form an induction coil. Eddy currents enable us to listen in without damaging or leaving a trace on the main cable, see?”

  “Gotcha. I took general science in high school. Okay, if I just have to coil wire around the cable, it ought to come free with a good stout jerk if we have to leave in a hurry, right?”

  “Of course. That’s part of the beauty of an induction coil. All the really sophisticated equipment stays up here, in this salon.”

  Flora opened what looked like a suitcase and said, “I’ll show you how some of it works, Dick. Do you know what this is?”

  “Sure, a gramophone. I didn’t know we had a record player aboard, Flora.”

  “It’s not a regular gramophone. It records the signal the tap picks up. We can leave it on even when we have to leave the room. Better yet, we can slow the record down so that Phoebe can transcribe it to shorthand easily. If she misses anything, she can play it over.”

  “Neat. What exactly do you do, Flora?”

  She blushed and looked away as she said, “I’m the cryptographer on the team. I search for codes hidden in the messages, and …”

  “Gotcha. I mostly wanted to know how to tap the
line, and you kids have told me all I need to know about my end of the wire.”

  He headed for his own quarters, stopping along the way to pick up some items from the ship’s stores. So, he was seated on the bunk, lashing a butcher knife from the galley to a swab handle with wire, when Flora joined him there. She closed the door behind her, He said, “Leave it open. I’ve been getting a little breeze through the port with the door ajar, but it’s still hot as hell in here.”

  She did as he asked, with a hurt look, and came to sit beside him as she asked what he was making. He said, “Shark spear, I hope. That diver’s knife attached to the suit is pretty iffy, when you think about it. By the time a shark gets close enough to stab with a knife in your hand, he could have said hand in his mouth to the elbow!”

  She said, “Brrr! I wish there was some other way to tap the cable.”

  “So do I. But there isn’t. Look at the bright side. I’ll be dropping straight down on it, at the safest time of the day. So, with luck, we’ll know in just a little while if Greystoke’s hunch about that cable was right or not.” She looked puzzled, so he explained, “He was too cute to tell us. But I figured it out. He doesn’t expect us to tap a regular cable. For one thing, you and Phoebe would be drowned in noise. How in hell could you girls keep tabs on all the communications zipping back and forth along a public line?”

  “We’ve been worried about that. Even with the gramophone recording every message, a lot of messages are sent in a day.”

  “Hell, a lot of messages are sent in an hour! You’d be listening in on everything from stock market quotations to lovers’ spats, and Cubans talk faster than most other Spanish speakers. Greystoke suspects this particular cable is military. A private line.”

  “Oh? How do you know, Dick?”

  “I don’t know. Neither does Greystoke. That’s why he sent us. The cable is new. It would be crudded up with sea growth if it had been on the bottom long enough to matter. It’s laid inconveniently south, in waters hardly anyone ever visits. So our real mission is to find out who laid it. Butcher Weyler and el Presidente Diaz may have a private understanding neither Washington nor London knows about, see?”