The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

  The water level was creeping up the side of the lead-lined engine box. Fortunately, the control valves I wanted were outside the box so I didn’t have to dismantle that. I lowered myself into the water and found, and turned, the lever of the Y-valve that switched the wash-down pump to pumping from the bilge instead of the Atlantic Ocean.

  That got as much water going out of the boat as we could manage without resorting to the manual pump, which wasn’t very effective. Now to tackle the water coming in. I groped around until I located, well submerged, the big gate valve for the raw-water intake. As I’d guessed, the hose had been disconnected and water was gushing into the boat. The reluctant handle seemed to turn forever before I got it closed. By the time I had the hose back in place, firmly clamped, and the valve open again, I was thoroughly soaked.

  “All secure forward, skipper.” Teresa was looking down into the engine room. She looked as wet as I felt; her pirate jersey was sodden, and her gray-streaked black hair was plastered to her skull as if she’d just emerged from a swimming pool. She went on, shouting over the noise of the engine. “He had two hoses off. I didn’t try to replace them; I just closed the sea cocks as you said. How are you doing down there?”

  I reported everything under control, which was not quite true: the motor had undoubtedly boiled away a lot of coolant which should be replaced, but to do that I’d have had to stop the mill and wait for its temperature to drop, which wasn’t practical at the moment. I climbed out of there. When I had the big hatches closed, I realized that my companion had disappeared. There was a gleam of light in the aft cabin. Looking through the framework of the splintered door, I saw her sitting on the bunk with the flashlight lying beside her. Even though it was aimed away from her, I could see that she was pulling on her shoe over the stained and sodden sock.

  I said, “For Christ’s sake, Terry, what are you trying to prove? To hell with your iron-woman act; now that we’ve things more or less under control, we’ve got to clean up that foot and bandage—”

  “Is a wet bandage any better than a wet sock? There’s no way I’m going to keep my feet dry, the way this boat is at the moment. Anyway, you’d better stop worrying about me and start thinking about where we’re going, skipper. At the moment I believe we’re still heading for Europe, or maybe Africa.”

  I said, “Okay, but first I want you to lie down on that bunk—”

  She said angrily, “Damn you, will you stop worrying about me? I’m perfectly swell. I toast my feet in the fire every morning before breakfast because I hate cold toes.”

  I said, “Relax, I’m not being solicitous. I just want you to shine that flashlight on the underside of the shelf across the stern. When Caselius was holding his flash to check my knots, the light reflected off the white bedsheet and I thought I saw something scratched into the wood that I hadn’t noticed in all the weeks I’ve slept in that bunk. Check it out for me, please.”

  “Aye, aye, skipper.” Lying on her back, she pushed herself aft and aimed the flashlight upward. Her voice reached me after a little. “There’s something here, all right. Some faint numbers.”

  “Can you read them?”

  She took a moment to respond. “They look as if they were written with a ballpoint pen, but of course there’s no ink because those things don’t work upside down. Does 365046 mean anything to you?”

  “Not at the moment. Is that all?”

  “No, there’s another one… Wait a minute, I missed a decimal point. 3650.46. And 7617.82.”

  “Let me get something to write on—”

  “Matt!”

  “What’s the trouble?”.

  Her voice expressed self-disgust. “How stupid can we get? It’s a position, of course! To hell with that mysteriously missing logbook, this is where Truman Fancher wrote down the loran reading he saw. Are you ready?”

  “Fire away.”

  “Latitude thirty-six degrees, fifty point four six minutes. That would be north, of course, although he didn’t bother to mark it down. And longitude seventy-six degrees, seventeen point eight two minutes west…” Her voice trailed off, and came again. “Thirty-six? But that’s crazy, Matt!”

  “What’s crazy?”

  “I don’t know about the longitude, offhand, but latitude thirty-six fifty has got to be over two hundred miles north of us. I haven’t really been keeping track, it’s not as if we’d been navigating the open ocean. Who checks latitude and longitude in these canals and rivers? But we’re south of Beaufort, North Carolina; we must be down around latitude thirty-two or thirty-three by this time. What’s a degree of latitude, anyway, sixty miles?”

  I said, “How would I know a thing like that? You’re talking to a dumb landlubber, remember? Well, you figure it out; I’d better check things topside.”

  Outside the deckhouse, it was a black night, starless and moonless, with a stiff breeze from the southwest. There were no lights visible in any direction; we had the Atlantic to ourselves, which was actually a good thing, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit lonely on my little boat in the middle of all that dark ocean—also, wet as I still was, rather chilly. Looking on the bright side, water was spouting from the bilge-pump outlet in a reassuring manner, and running along the deck and over the side from the gushing wash-down faucet; Lorelei III was beginning to feel bouyant and seaworthy once more.

  When I reentered the deckhouse, Teresa was standing at the chart table. She’d turned on the red light above it that was supposed to let you navigate without spoiling your night vision. She hadn’t dried off much yet, either, and her jeans and jersey clung in wet wrinkles to her sturdy figure. It occurred to me that she was the third dripping dame I’d entertained in Lorelei III’s deckhouse. It also occurred to me that, while of course I prefer them young and slim and blond, given my druthers, somebody with different tastes might find that strong adult body and dark hawklike face and dramatic gray-streaked hair not unattractive. There certainly was nothing missing in the courage department.

  Theresa looked around. “This is perfectly ridiculous!” she said.

  “What’s ridiculous?”

  Some water dripped from her hair onto the chart in front of her. She wiped it away with a towel she’d found somewhere, and squeezed the lank strands back from her face.

  “It doesn’t make sense!” she protested. “Truman Fancher sailed up from Florida, and had a heart attack when he saw his wife and her friends unloading something from his boat—we think a peculiarly nasty homemade bomb—at a certain spot down along the waterway. At that point he’s supposed to have sneaked a peek at the loran and jotted down the reading in a logbook that was never found. Then the sick old man was brought further up the ICW in a fairly helpless condition. He finally died just below—south of—Coinjock, North Carolina. Have I got it right?”

  “That’s what we’ve been told,” I said.

  “Then how does it happen that the position he went to a lot of trouble to scratch over his bunk is fifty miles north of Coinjock? A spot he’s not supposed to have reached at all on this trip except perhaps in a coffin? A spot we’re supposedly looking for here, way down south, that we’ve actually been getting farther and farther away from every day!”

  “Show me.”

  Teresa put her fingers on the chart. “Right there, Captain Helm, sir. The place where you and I stopped several days ago and left some rigging to be repaired. The Tidewater Marina, Norfolk, Virginia!”

  27

  It seemed very quiet with the engine stopped. Lorelei III lay hove to on the port tack. I’d unrolled about half the mainsail to hold her steady—well, as steady as a thirty-eight-foot boat can be offshore on a breezy night—while I waited for the overheated mill to cool, and patched up my reluctant crew.

  “I just got that damn shoe on and now you want to pull it off again. I tell you my foot is just fine!” Teresa protested, trying to rise from the deckhouse settee as I knelt before her. “Why don’t you let me worry abut my foot? We’re wasting time!”

 
I said, “We’ve got it to waste. Just sit still and drink your drink.” A little stimulant had seemed indicated; and I took a sip from my own glass—and set it aside, hearing the happy sound, or cessation of sound, I’d been waiting for. The automatic bilge pump had cut out, indicating no more water to pump. I went over and shut off the manually controlled wash-down pump and returned to my patient. I said, “Hang on now, while I get this sock off.”

  Fortunately, being wet, it hadn’t stuck. I didn’t comment on the mess that was revealed when I got it off. What the hell, it was just a burned foot; and it wasn’t the first burn I’d ever seen. If she could take it, I could.

  Teresa protested. “Look, we’ve got to get on the radio and—”

  “Take it easy,” I said. “Think about it, Terry. Who’re we going to call on that VHF and what are we going to say—with the whole world listening, including Dorothy Fancher and Roland Caselius? They’re bound to have their ears on, aren’t they?”

  “I’ve asked you not to call me Terry,” she said. “And we’ll simply call the Coast Guard—”

  “And tell them to send somebody to thirty-six degrees north and seventy-six degrees west and pick up a nice little atom bomb mislaid by a careless yachtsman?”

  “Well, why not?” she asked. “If they check the records of the Tidewater Marina, they can find out what slip Truman Fancher’s boat had last spring. The bomb is probably right there, most likely invisible under water, lashed to one of those big barnacled dock pilings… Ouch!”

  I hadn’t thought the word was in her vocabulary; but apparently she didn’t feel compelled to play the complete stoic in front of me alone. Wading around in the flooded cabin hadn’t done her foot any good; and I was using a pair of surgical scissors from the first-aid kit to trim away the broken blisters.

  “You’re going to say all this over the air?” I said, “And what will Fancher, Caselius, and Co., do when they hear their precious secret revealed to the world?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I said, “Do you think Dorothy is going to let months of risk and labor just go down the drain? At present she seems to be waiting for something to happen in Norfolk—a ceremony of some kind that she wants to disrupt—but if you announce over the air that all is discovered, isn’t it likely that she’ll rush to the nearest phone and call her man or woman in Norfolk and say ‘go baby, go,’ however that reads in Arabic? She promised me shattered buildings and blackened bodies. Do you really expect her to give up altogether, just because the timing isn’t quite right? I mean, she’s a real damager; if she can’t have the scenario she’s planned, she’ll just wreck the city of Norfolk out of pure anti-American spite. And she’ll have time enough to do it. Even if the Coast Guard believes you—remember that they’re plagued with a lot of phony distress calls, and you’ll be asking them to accept a real weirdo—and even if they react instantly, it’s going to take them a while to get the right kind of bomb expert to the right place.”

  “But we can’t just sit here…!”

  I said, “We sure as hell can, for a while. They indicated that the ceremony, whatever it is, isn’t scheduled until this weekend. Two o’clock on either Saturday or Sunday. It would be nice if they’d told us which, but you can’t have everything. This is only Thursday. We don’t have to rush; we’ve got time to do it right.”

  “Do what, if we’re not going to call the Coast Guard?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t say we shouldn’t call them. I just said we shouldn’t tell them stuff over the VHF that’ll send the opposition into a nuclear convulsion. Remember, they don’t know we’ve found those elusive numbers that old Fancher did not write in his logbook; and we won’t tell them over the air. Actually, we have a choice. We can try to get ashore and find a telephone from which, without being overheard, you can call either the CG or, preferably, somebody you know in Washington with real clout who knows you and won’t ask a lot of dumb questions and can get things moving in Norfolk. That sounds good; the trouble is that I don’t like the way this shallow coastline looks on the chart. It’s a lee shore with this breeze, which keeps getting stronger; and I have a hunch that by the time we get close to one of those inlets there are going to be breakers clear across it. I know I’m not man enough—seaman enough—to run that stuff. If you think you can handle it, okay, we’ll give it a try.”

  Teresa shook her head. “No, I don’t know this coast either; but I do know that most of the inlets change so often, with storms and tidal currents, that it takes a local, like Dorothy’s Paul Rashid, to keep track of the shifting channels.”

  I said, “So we go to Plan B. We do call the Coast Guard; but we make it a simple distress call, just what our friends would expect to hear from us, if we managed to cut ourselves free before the boat went down. We hold off on the important stuff until the CG gets here and we can explain things face to face without the whole world listening… Now where are you going?”

  “What do you mean? I’m going to make the call, of course!”

  I said, “Mrs. Teresa Bell, you are the hastiest dame I ever met. Sit down and relax and have another drink.”

  “But—”

  “Sit, goddamn it! My God, how did you ever get anything done in Washington, the way you keep going off half-cocked? Today is Thursday. We’ve got until Saturday, maybe even until Sunday; what’s the everlasting rush? Stay put while I fill your glass—and you ask yourself what the opposition’s reaction to this broadcast is going to be.”

  When I returned, she took the drink I offered her and said, “I suppose you mean that, when they hear they didn’t sink us after all, they’ll come charging back out to finish the job.”

  I said, “Maybe not Dorothy. She doesn’t like either of us, and I was kind of mean to her lover, but she’s had her fun with you, and the girl who really killed Hassim is dead. With the big bang coming up, Dorothy may just grab a ride north so as not to miss the sight of the beautiful mushroom cloud scheduled for the weekend. But Caselius has a vengeance hanging fire; he’ll be out here, you can bet on it.”

  “Even after the Coast Guard has been summoned?”

  I said, “According to the loran, we’re only twelve miles from the nearest inlet, the one they probably used to bring us out here—and to get back in again. So Caselius has been through it twice with Paul Rashid; unlike us, he knows the channel. If he commandeers Gulf Streamer, as he probably will, at twenty to twenty-five knots it can be here in considerably less than an hour. Unless the Coast Guard just happens to have a cutter nearby, there’s not a chance in the world they can get here that quickly. He’ll have plenty of time to sink us, if we let him; after which he can run that overpowered sixty-footer ashore and disappear before the Coast Guard pops over the horizon… Do you want this goop on it?”

  “What?”

  I held up a tube of ointment. “It’s for burns, it says here, antibiotic and anesthetic and everything.”

  “All right, put it on; maybe it will at least keep the bandage from sticking.” After a moment, Teresa asked, “What can we do about it? If anything.”

  I said, “We’ll be kind of outclassed, with that three-story, two-thousand-horsepower fishing machine coming at us, but at least we can start by lying here hove to without disturbing the airwaves until our little eighty-horse mill has cooled enough that I can open up the radiator—if that’s what you call it on a boat—and pour water and antifreeze into it without being scalded to death or cracking the block. Trying to outmaneuver Gulf Streamer isn’t going to be fun under any circumstances; I sure as hell don’t want to have to try it under sail alone.”

  She was silent for a moment; then she asked, “Matt, how did we get everything so wrong?”

  I said, “Get, hell. It was given to us. We believed everything Dorothy Fancher told us—mainly me—about Truman Fancher’s last cruise. Actually, I have a hunch Jerome Blum’s bomb wasn’t even put aboard Lorelei III in Florida, as she told me. It was probably put aboard just south of Coinjock, N.C., and that ope
ration was what the old man saw when he woke up unexpectedly, that gave him his heart attack. At least that’s the way I figure it now. From there it’s only a couple of days’ run to Norfolk— well, it took us two days; actually you could make it in one if you pushed hard. So they raced fifty miles north and planted their radioactive mushroom tree. But the old man wasn’t quite as sick as he pretended; he knew that his boat and his sexy wife were involved in something lousy, and he’d been playing possum in that big bunk, waiting to learn more about it. In Norfolk, he saw the gadget being hauled out of the engine room. In that aft cabin, he couldn’t see much through the ports, so he didn’t know where the hell he was, but he could read the loran; and he scratched the position on that overhead shelf. But he was afraid somebody might spot it, so as a diversion he simply dropped the logbook, that he often kept on the dresser by his bunk when not under way, out one of the open ports. When Dorothy realized that it was missing and started raising hell, he gave her the song-and-dance about what he’d written in it and how well he’d hidden it. It kept them from looking for anything else; and after the way she’d betrayed him I don’t suppose he minded giving her something to worry about.”

  Theresa said, “Don’t make that dressing so bulky I can’t get my shoe back on… But why did they go to all that trouble to use Lorelei III. Why not just use a boat of their own?”

  “Respectability,” I said. “At least I figure that must have been the reason. Truman Fancher was a well-known yachtsman and his motor sailer had been shuttling up and down the Waterway for several years after he retired from racing. He was probably well known in that Norfolk marina. And criminals do tend to be paranoid, and minority criminals think the world discriminates against them, and maybe it does. I suspect they felt that if a cheap power cruiser manned by a bunch of dark-skinned bums came into Tidewater, everybody’d be watching it suspiciously wondering what they planned to steal; but if it was just old Fancher and his Lorelei on his twice-yearly Waterway pilgrimage nobody’d pay any attention—the fact that he didn’t appear on deck probably wouldn’t even be noticed with his wife doing the honors—and they could unload their whizbang at leisure, unobserved.” I shrugged. “And the next day, having planted their firecracker, they raced back south.”