by Lou Cameron
Flora frowned and said, “No, I don’t see. Diaz is supposed to be allied with the U.S. They say he’s part Indian, and wasn’t that the whole point of Mexico’s revolt from Spain? Mestizos and pure Spanish Gachupines don’t like each other, Dick.”
“What can I tell you? Diaz doesn’t like anybody, least of all gringos. But he knows where his bread is buttered. He’ll also do anything for a fast peso. He could double-cross the U.S. on Cuba if Spain made him a better offer. On the other hand, for all we know, that cable was laid by Cuban rebels, and they could be plotting with damned near anybody on the mainland. This neck of the ocean was made for running guns. But look, why speculate? Let’s tap the damned line and find out!”
She put a hand on his knee and asked, “Do you have to dive right now?”
He laughed and said, “Cut it out, you’re giving me a hard-on. You know I’d rather wrestle with you than a shark, babe. But I have to save my strength.” He consulted his watch and added, “It’s almost time. I have to go on deck in a few minutes, so behave yourself.”
She said, “Hurry back, then. I confess you’ve awakened some feelings I never knew I had. It felt so good last night, to let myself go completely in a man’s arms. I don’t mean just the lovemaking. I mean the way we talked about it so openly. I’d never done that before, even with my late husband. Do other girls like to let their hair down like that, Dick?”
“Everybody does. But we’re raised so prudishly that half the married people in the world have never seen each other naked in broad day. A lot of couples would be happier if they could only get over the notion that you have to be ladies and gents, even when you’re screwing.”
“I’ve gotten used to calling it fucking, and I like it. I’ve been thinking about some things we haven’t tried yet, Dick. Things I’ve always wondered about. Now that I can speak so freely—”
“Later,” he cut in with a chuckle, adding, “I’m sure going to look silly in that diving suit with a hard-on.” Then, since he had as curious a nature as most men, he asked, “What did you have in mind, in case I get back with all my important parts still attached?”
She blushed slightly and murmured, “Well, I’ve been talking to Phoebe.”
“Yeah? I thought you were afraid of her seducing you, doll.”
“I used to be. I’m not worried about having to resist temptation now. To be frank, I was tired of her bragging, and, well, maybe I bragged a bit, too. It seems I’m a couple of positions up on her, you horrid thing.”
He laughed and answered, “What can I tell you? We didn’t have as much time. Get to the point, I gotta go.”
“Well, have you ever taken part in an orgy, Dick?”
“Not recently,” he lied. “Why?”
“Phoebe says she has, and it’s fun. So we were wondering if later this evening—”
“You’re kidding! You, me, Phoebe, and Gaston all in a row? It sounds a little sticky, doll. Since we’re playing True Confessions, I have shared a dame with another guy in my time. But it makes me nervous.”
She said, “Silly, we didn’t intend to invite Gaston along. Phoebe says she’ll satisfy him and then join us here later.
“Phoebe would. But what the hell will you get out of the deal, doll? Don’t you want me to give you my undivided attention tonight?”
She grinned like a naughty child and explained, “Phoebe says it’s a good way to get over unreasonable jealousy. I told her we were, ah, just comrades in amours, but I confessed I was still a little miffed about you and her. Phoebe says that if I actually watched you make love to another girl while you, ah, played with me or something—”
“Gotcha. We’ll work something out later. Speaking about people with odd sexual views, I’ve been wondering about that electrician working the eavesdropping gear with you girls.”
“Which one, Clarke or Chadwick? They’re both pansies.”
“Oh? I figured little Chadwick walked sort of funny. Didn’t take Clarke for a mariposa, though. How do you girls know?”
“Phoebe found out. When neither of them made a pass at her back in Belize, she peeked. She says Clarke is the boy and Chadwick is the girl. Why do you ask? Surely you don’t want to try that, do you?”
“I’m saving that for my old age, after I’ve made love to all the women in the world. Okay, I guess we don’t have to worry about your coworkers getting jealous if you spend too much time in bed with the boss. Get your hand off my fly, and let’s see what’s going on down there on the sea bottom.”
*
Captain Gringo knew he’d made a mistake as soon as they closed the faceplate of the helmet. The rubberized canvas will still damp and sticky, and the helmet had been left out in the hot sun too long and smelled like the inside of a brass cannon that had been fired recently. Rice had shown him how to adjust the helmet valve. But there was no need to as he went down the ladder into the water, dragging air line, lifeline, and tap line after him as he tried to hang on to his improvised spear. The air hissed out the relief valve, but there was little sound from the intake over his scalp, since the suit was already pressurized. As he dropped completely below the surface, his ears were filled with the sound of his rising bubbles. He started to feel cooler at once, of course, but the inside of the suit still smelled like old gym socks and brass polish. He got to the bottom of the ladder and let go. His suit weights pulled him slowly to the bottom. Too slowly. He reached up and let some air out to drop faster. He knew sharks were more likely to attack near the surface.
Yeah, there were sharks. Hammerheads. The lookout had spotted them before he’d gone over the side. Some idiot had suggested shooting at them, but Gaston had told him he was an idiot, so there was no shark blood in the water to upset the balance of nature.
As his weighted feet hit bottom and he was enveloped knee deep in milky silt, Captain Gringo saw that nature was still balanced. He could see clearly about fifty yards in all directions if he moved his head and shoulders together in the clumsy rig. He was in the shadow of the schooner’s hull and hence appeared as a mysterious, bubble-breathing black something to the hammerheads as they circled in the distance like Indians around a wagon camp. He hoped they were just curious. Hammerheads were ugly sonsofbitches as they moved their weird heads from side to side, sniffing. But hammerheads played to mixed reviews and weren’t considered man eaters, most of the time. Gaston said that native pearl divers were less afraid of hammerheads than of tigers or lemons. But every once in a while someone caught a hammerhead with a human arm or leg in its belly, so it wasn’t a good idea to pet one. They were most likely to attack in poor visibility or at any time if they smelled blood in the water. So, Captain Gringo reminded himself to be careful about skinning any knuckles as he plodded over to the nearby cable, dropped in slow motion to his knees, and stood the spear on end in the sand. The hammerheads just kept circling. So, he moved with slow, deliberate motions as he picked up a length of the heavy cable and wedged a loose block of dead coral under it. Even so, the slight disturbance of the silty bottom clouded the water around him as if someone had spilled milk in it.
But the charts were right about the current. It wasn’t as strong here in the channel between two keys, but the silt cloud drifted away like cigar smoke in a gentle draft. He started wrapping the induction coil around the cable, keeping the turns neat and even .as the rather fussy Clarke had warned him he must. Captain Gringo knew enough about electricity to understand why. The eddy currents running through the insulated cable would be garbled if the coil picking them up was sloppy. Hence, the job took much longer than if he’d simply had to whip a hundred turns of twine around a sapling log. The proportions were about the same, but the copper tap line was stiff, his wet fingers were slippery, and if he cut himself, he could wind up bleeding indeed when those hammerheads smelled it!
He stopped every few turns to check them out. There was a porthole to the front and either side of the helmet, and he could of course move his head inside it. He was out of luck from the rear un
less he wanted to twist his whole body at the waist. He wanted to. But each time he took time out to look the sharks over, they were still looking him over at a polite distance. He wondered what in hell they thought he was. He could only hope they wouldn’t come closer to find out. Maybe he could stop one of them with his spear, but after that it would be up for grabs, with blood in the water ringing the dinner bell for sharks too far away to see!
He was almost finished when he stopped for another look-see and saw something he didn’t like much. It wasn’t another hammerhead. A wall of white silt was moving across the sea bottom toward him, like a fog bank. He frowned and muttered, “What the hell?” Then he went back to work. Obviously something had disturbed the bottom, a lot, up-current. But, with luck, he’d finish before the oncoming silt enveloped him. He resisted the impulse to work faster. He didn’t want them to tell him he had to come back down and do it again. His mouth was dry with the green taste of fear on his tongue, but he was used to that. A knock-around guy had to keep his nerves under control and do the job right. So, he did. He finished the induction coil and secured it with a few inches of friction tape from the tool kit on his belt. Then he muttered, “Enough of this shit. Time to haul ass!”
But he rose slowly, not wanting to excite the sharks in the middle distance. The fog bank of silt was almost upon him. So, he backed toward the shadow of Nombre Nada, facing the milky wall. He knew anything swimming in it could see him better than he could see it, and he still didn’t know who’d stirred up the silt with its tail, fins, or whatever. He doubted it was a minnow.
The first tendrils of silt enveloped Captain Gringo as he was almost under the ladder. He could still see eight or ten feet in front of him, sort of. He forced himself to remain calm as he gripped the spear and lifeline in one hand and reached up with his other to adjust the exhaust valve on his helmet. He was afraid to signal the deck to haul him in. They could do so too quickly, and he didn’t want to be trolled like a tempting bait. He knew another way to surface. It was a bit tricky. If you inflated your suit too much, you bobbed to the surface like a cork. If you let the air escape faster than it was being pumped to you, the water pressure could hug you to death, at this depth. He wasn’t far down enough to worry about the bends, within reason, if he didn’t get really silly with the pressure. So, he adjusted the valve just a little, and sure enough, he felt lighter and lighter and his lead soles left the bottom as he slowly drifted upward toward safety.
Somebody skulking in the silt cloud he’d deliberately stirred up didn’t like that. So, as Captain Gringo floated upward, he suddenly spotted something coming at him out of the mist, fast!
There wasn’t time to think. Captain Gringo thrust his spear instinctively, and by the time he realized it was another human being, armed with a machete and naked save for an odd, masklike triangular helmet, the butcher-knife blade of his spear had ripped the sonofabitch open from ribs to pubic bone, spilling his guts and a billowing cloud of what looked like chocolate syrup between them! Captain Gringo knew that human blood wasn’t red this deep under water, but it was still blood, and a lot of it! He gasped, “Oh boy!” and inflated his suit more to chase his bubbles to the top. As his helmet broke the surface, he grabbed the rungs of the ladder and started climbing. The guys above got the message and started hauling on his lines to help him. So, all the first hammerhead to hit him got was the taste of metal and some loose teeth as it snapped at Captain Gringo’s left boot, a foot above the water.
Up on deck, he sat heavily on a barrel as they started taking off his gear. Gaston, at the rail, called out, “Merde alors! The sharks have gone mad down there! I can’t see what is going on, but it looks like someone whipping blood and milk in a bowl with fish tails. What happened, Dick?”
Captain Gringo said, “I got luckier than Carmichael. He wasn’t hit by a shark. Some sonofabitch cut his air line with a machete! I was too close to the hull to try that on me. So, he took a more direct approach, and guess who won?”
“Another diver? That’s incredible! From where? There is no other vessel within miles!”
“Tell me something I didn’t know. Hurry it up, guys. I have to pay another social call on those innocent turtle hunters!”
As he climbed out of the suit and strapped on his gun rig again, Gaston said; “It won’t work, Dick. That key is too far for anyone to swim underwater all the way. The lookout would have spotted a human head if he’d surfaced to breathe, non?”
“Yeah, but who looks at a shark fin in these waters? The bastard had some sort of basketwork cone over his head. Remember that so-called fin we spotted right after Carmichael bought the farm?”
“Ah, oui, it was headed south, toward that key, too!”
*
They didn’t go right away. By the time Captain Gringo issued the arms and started to plan the assault, he’d had time to think. The islanders hadn’t fired at them the first time because nobody but an idiot fires at anyone armed with a machine gun unless he thinks he has to. Now that Alejandro or somebody built like him had been shredded by hammerheads, the rules of the game could change. The guys on the scrub-covered key had cover. Anyone crossing open water toward them wouldn’t. So, it was literally a Mexican standoff until the sun went down again.
Obviously, the islanders didn’t have the guts or muscle to assault the Nombre Nada openly, or they’d have done so by now. Captain Gringo decided to hit them under cover of darkness. Hard. Meanwhile, they had other chores.
He found the two girls and the two fairies busily recording messages in the salon. They seemed busy as hell. The tap was working. Clarke and Chadwick took turns fiddling with switches to amplify the eddy currents with their mysterious black boxes. Phoebe had on a set of earphones and was scribbling like hell in shorthand as the gramophone recorded anything she missed. Across the card table from her, Flora was transcribing the blonde’s Spanish shorthand into English longhand and looking for hidden messages. Captain Gringo picked up a sheet of paper and read, “Sell A.B.N. Apply proceeds DuPont.”
He knew who DuPont was, and anyone could see that if a real brawl broke out in Cuba, anyone making smokeless powder figured to show a profit in the near future. He didn’t want to disturb the girls. But Flora noted the puzzled look on his face and took the sheet from him to reread it. She said, “A.B.N. is American Bank Notes, Incorporated, in New York. They make money printing paper money for other people.”
He nodded and picked up another sheet as she went back to work. Somebody figured he was holding too much stock in an outfit that made paper money. Big deal. Both the Spanish and Cuban libs handed out pretty useless paper money. By itself, the message wasn’t much more.
He’d been taught at West Point that military intelligence seldom consisted of just picking up the whole picture in one bunch of bananas. It was only in spy novels that somebody ran off with the enemy battle plans in his pocket. Any military operation called for boxes and boxes of paperwork. Spies stole a clue here and a clue there, and let the heavy thinkers topside figure out the big picture.
He read, “John Brown wants too much. Suggest Wedgwood.” He caught Flora’s eye and she said, “I know. It has to be a code. It makes no sense as sent. There’s no way Queen Victoria’s late butler and mayhap lover could be in competition with Wedgwood China, limited. I’ve put that aside to work on later.”
He nodded, dropped the message on her growing pile, and stepped over to Chadwick to ask, “Are you picking up any telephone messages?”
Chadwick lisped, “No, thank heavens. Everything’s in international Morse. It makes life ever so much simpler. We can record much more on a gramophone drum by speeding up the machine while recording and slowing it down for dear Phoebe to transcribe. Dots and dashes are like that.”
“Military line,” said Captain Gringo with a firm nod, adding, “I figured it had to be, this far south.”
“The Spanish military buys Wedgwood china?”
“Why not? Everybody else does. Keep up the good work, gang.”
He went back on deck to join Gaston by the bow machine gun. He’d ordered Nombre Nada sprung on her moorings to face the key to the south head on. Any sons-of-bitches intending a pirate dash in small craft would have their work cut out for them, rowing toward the high barricaded bluff bows instead of the lower and more open stem.
He told Gaston about the first messages, and Gaston agreed they sounded like someone was chatting in code. Captain Gringo stared westward at the pencil line Mexican coast and said, “The question before the house is, who in hell is chatting with whom? You told me there’s nothing over that way but mangrove swamps.”
“Mais oui. Nothing in Yucatan manages to rise more than a few feet above sea level. Since the Mayan Empire fell apart to be devoured by jungle, this has not seemed important, since hardly anyone is stupid enough to want to live in Yucatan these days.”
“Okay, but if nobody’s there, who’s holding the mainland end of this string? The Mexican military makes little sense. The few communications in Yucatan are along the coastline to the north, right?”
“True. Why build roads or anything else through trés fatigue jungle when there is no need to, hein? What Mexico calls the post road to Merida is little more than a jungle trail. From the state capital to Tizimin, the farthest town east, the post road gets worse. But it still would make more sense for them to string their communications lines along that route. There is nothing but a few isolated Indian villages due west of here, and for countless miles beyond.”
Captain Gringo thought and said, “Okay. The cable could have been run down along the beach from this Tizimin, then, right?”
“Mais non. In the first place, there is no continuous beach over there. It is a disgusting line of low sea cliffs and broad, impenetrable mangrove swamps. In the second place, Tizimin is at least eighty of your English miles inland!”
“No shit? Okay, try her this way. If the nearest town Mexico knows it has is miles from here, Cuban libs must have set up a secret base in the mainland jungle where neither the rurales nor the Spanish army can bother them.”
