The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

  “Why? Why didn’t they just continue up Chesapeake Bay?”

  I shrugged. “They had a dying man on board—and if he didn’t manage to die of his own accord, when they were ready for it, Dorothy was right there to help him with a pillow, I’m sure. Obviously, after what he’d seen, he couldn’t be allowed to survive and tell about it. But if, after they reported the death, and presented the body, it became known that they’d been in Norfolk and kept on going, they’d be asked why they hadn’t got the sick old gent into a big-city hospital when they had the chance. This way, Dorothy could claim, as she did, that they were out in those endless Carolina sounds and marshes south of Coinjock when Truman had his coronary and he’d refused to let her radio for help: he didn’t need any lousy helicopters, he’d insisted that he could by God make it to a Norfolk hospital under his own power. Of course, if somebody wanted to unravel their itinerary, witnesses could probably be found—the lock keeper at Great Bridge, for instance—who’d seen them going both ways, but nobody thought to investigate, not even Lori Fancher, so they got away with it.”

  Teresa nodded. “Well, I guess it’s plausible. What are you doing?”

  “I don’t want to put that wet shoe on it; I’m getting a Baggie to tape over it to keep it dry, at least for the time being.”

  “Matt?”

  “Yes?”

  She was frowning. “Why Norfolk? It’s not all that big and important a city. If they’d just kept coming north a few more days, they could have had Washington, D.C. Or Baltimore. What’s in Norfolk that makes it such a desirable target for a bunch of Arab terrorists?”

  I shrugged. “Well, it’s a big harbor, and it has a lot of shipbuilding… Oh, Jesus Christ!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “That goddamn carrier!”

  “What goddamn carrier?”

  I said, “You were asleep below when we came past all the navy stuff. There was a sizable submarine heading out; right afterward, there was an obscenely enormous aircraft carrier in a dry dock or something. I mean, the thing was the size of the island of Manhattan. And the Tidewater Marina wasn’t more than a mile or two beyond it.”

  “You think—”

  I said, “Something’s been nagging at my memory. It just came back to me. Guess what the name of that overgrown flattop was.”

  She licked her lips. “The Richard something?”

  “Well, you’re close.” After a moment, I went on. “In case your memory is faulty, let me give you a little refresher course in American history, ma’am. Back in 1779, if I remember rightly—anyway, during the revolution—a U.S. ship under the command of a nautical gent called John Paul Jones tackled a British convoy that was escorted by the frigate Serapis. Jones took a pounding at the start of the battle, enough that the Britisher asked him to surrender. Jones responded with the deathless words: ‘I have not yet begun to fight!’ After which he managed to capture the Serapis and the rest of the fleet, becoming our first great naval hero. His ship had a funny name for a Yankee privateer: the Bonnehomme Richard.”

  Teressa drew a long breath. “And that was the name of the aircraft carrier you saw?”

  “That was the name,” I said. “What do you bet her crew refers to her as the Big Dick?”

  “Ha ha.” She finished her drink and set the glass aside. “And you think she’s the target? But you say the marina is over a mile away.”

  “Something like that.”

  She frowned. “Is a little homemade bomb, even if it is atomic, going to hurt a big warship that far off? Those ships are built to withstand bombs and gunfire right up close, aren’t they?”

  I said, “As far as the ship itself is concerned, maybe a blast at that range won’t do more than shake her up a bit. But we’re talking about a ceremony, remember, which is almost bound to be staged out on that great, wide-open flight deck. As I recall, at Hiroshima, people caught in the open even a couple of miles away from ground zero didn’t find it a very healthy experience. And one reason Jerome Blum slipped and doused himself with plutonium or whatever is that he was instructed to make his boom-boom just as dirty as he could.”

  “Dirty? Oh, you mean with radioactivity.” After a moment, Teresa said, “I still wonder what made them pick that particular target; that particular carrier.”

  I said, “I think the real question is: what kind of a ceremony is planned on board and who’s going to attend?”

  “Of course, it doesn’t really matter,” she said. “Regardless of who’s involved, we’ve obviously got to stop it.”

  “You do,” I said. “It’s not in my contract. I was hired to keep this boat afloat, not to save some lousy VIPs from radiation poisoning… Relax. Just kidding. But in order to be sure to stop it, we’ve got to survive long enough to get the word out, which means that our immediate problem is Caselius. So we won’t go on the air until I’ve got this boat in reasonable fighting trim. But I don’t need any help getting things organized on deck and attending to the motor when it cools; you might as well lie down and rest a bit. I’m going to need you sharp and healthy when the action starts. Use the big bunk aft; it’s more comfortable.”

  “Well, all right, I guess I do feel a little shaky.” She laughed shortly. “If I were younger and prettier, I’d have some reservations about a man who was forever trying to get me into a bed.”

  I looked at her for a moment, and said, “You’re a brave and handsome lady and you don’t need to fish for compliments.”

  “I wasn’t—” She stopped. After a moment, she said, “Thank you, Matt. Wake me when it’s time.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  28

  I’d checked that the shotgun, and the rifle with its laser sight reinstalled, were secure in their brackets at the upper steering station. The ammunition was in my pants pockets, rifle cartridges left, shotgun shells right. The mainsail had been furled again: I didn’t need the hassle of trying to trim sails during the violent maneuvering I anticipated. The engine, once more fully supplied with a proper mixture of water and antifreeze, seemed to have come to no harm; it sounded fine, ticking over gently, in gear, as the autopilot guided us slowly shoreward.

  I sat at the swaying deckhouse table trying to construct a Molotov cocktail with a sting. I’d emptied a bottle of Chardonnay into the galley sink—with regrets, although at five bucks a fifth it was hardly what you’d call a great wine—and filled it with gasoline from the red two-and-a-half gallon can kept on board to supply the inflatable dinghy’s little outboard motor. I’d jammed a strip of rag into the neck, along with the cork, and left about six inches hanging out. I’d got out Romey Blum’s neat little four-stick dynamite bomb, taped the bottle to it, and then taped the butane lighter from the galley on top of everything, aimed at the rag, which I tacked down with tape so it would be sure to receive the flame. In theory, with the cloth well soaked with gasoline, all I had to do was pull the trigger of the lighter to set it on fire, and heave the whole mess onto the other boat. The bottle would break and release the gas, the burning rag would ignite that, and the heat of the blazing fuel would set off the dynamite. Well, it was a pretty theory.

  Blum had designed his bomb to be detonated electrically, of course; but I knew that if I started monkeying around with batteries and wires and blasting caps that I knew nothing about I’d blow myself up for sure; and I couldn’t think of a gadget that would make reliable electrical contact on impact, anyway. A good hot fire ought to do the job; and even if the dynamite didn’t go off, well, a lot of blazing gasoline would at least embarrass the enemy. If I could get the thing aboard.

  I stowed the super-Molotov cocktail at the aft steering station, beneath the overhang of the deckhouse. Then I stood for a moment watching my little ship idling westward; without any canvas up, she was rolling heavily in the quartering seas. I couldn’t help remembering that I’d spent a lot of time and effort to get her back into shape; in the process I’d developed considerable respect and affection for the sturdy old vessel. I didn
’t like to think of the broken headstay, the soggy carpets below— I’d got the sea salt out of them once but it hadn’t been easy—and the smashed door. It was no way to treat a good boat, and she’d probably suffer worse damage before the night was over.

  I patted the big destroyer wheel before going below. “Sorry, old girl. We’ve got no choice. It’s the bloody Battle of Midway and pretty soon we’ll have the big Jap carriers coming at us.”

  In the deckhouse, the only lights were the reddish glow of the compass, the two greenish rectangles of the loran display, and above them, a big red sixteen showing in the channel-selector window of the VHF radio. I turned up the volume, but there was no chatter over the air at the moment; perhaps all the lonely nautical conversationalists had gone ashore for the night. I debated using Mayday and decided against it. This was between Caselius and me. I didn’t want any innocent vessels to come charging nobly to the rescue. The Coast Guard, okay. Like me, they’d been hired to shoot and get shot at occasionally.

  So quit stalling, hero. I took the mike out of its clip and pressed the transmit button.

  “U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Coast Guard, this is motor sailer Lorelei III. Our position is…” I read the lat-long coordinates off the loran. “We have an emergency, we have an emergency. I repeat, this is thirty-eight-foot motor sailer Lorelei III, Whiskey Alpha Hotel eight eight five five, with engine failure and a bad leak, two persons on board, calling U.S. Coast Guard. Our position is…”

  I read off the figures again and released the button. I’d expected a wait, but the boys were on the ball. A young male voice responded promptly.

  “Vessel calling U.S. Coast Guard, switch to channel twenty-two Alpha.”

  “Twenty-two Alpha, aye, aye.”

  I had no idea what Alpha signified, but I’d listened in on Coast Guard conversations from time to time and I knew it was what they always said. I also knew, having tried it, that putting a plain old number twenty-two into the VHF channel-selector window would bring them in fine, fuck Alpha. I twiddled the knobs and pushed the buttons accordingly.

  “This is Lorelei III.”

  “This is the U.S. Coast Guard…”

  With contact established on the new channel, I was ordered to put life jackets on everyone on board, after which we were off on the usual bureaucratic information-collecting, form-filling-out routine: description of boat— size, color, number of masts, horsepower of engine (when functioning)—registration or documentation number, where from, where to, names and home addresses of all on board, nature of emergency (I made up something dramatic here that, I’m afraid, varied significantly from the truth) and did I consider it life-threatening.

  “Not right away, no, sir,” I said. “We have two electric pumps and they’re pretty much keeping up with the leak at the moment, but with the engine out, the batteries won’t last forever, and I don’t think we’ll be able to keep her afloat with the little manual bilge pump alone.”

  “It will take about three hours for us to reach you. Can you hold out that long?”

  “All we can do is try.”

  “Stay tuned to this channel and report any—”

  “Coast Guard, Coast Guard.” A male voice that I recognized broke in. “This is Gulf Streamer, sixty-two foot sportfisherman off Little Pogie Inlet. We can reach the vessel in distress in about half an hour and stand by until you get there…”

  I listened to the exchange, as they went through the same bureaucratic hassle as before and, with all vital statistics duly recorded, doubtless in the right color ink on the proper paper—well, okay, it’s probably punched into a computer nowadays—settled my future between them, finally asking me if I approved, which of course I did. With everything arranged, I returned the mike to its clip, grinning.

  It was nice to meet a young man with principles. I remembered that Roland Caselius had been brought up in a country that considered a saber scar no disfigurement but a mark of honor. He could have stayed off the air and tried to catch me unawares; instead he’d deliberately warned me he was coming for me. Obviously he saw himself engaging in some kind of a romantic nautical duel with his daddy’s murderer. His boat had the advantage in power and speed and there was nothing he could do about that, but he’d felt obliged to inform me that he was taking no other advantages; he wasn’t going to sneak up on me in the dark like an assassin. Well, like me.

  Of course, not being stupid, he was also, undoubtedly, quite aware that he’d probably bought himself a little more time to finish us off. The Coast Guard wouldn’t be in quite so much of a rush to rescue us, knowing that somebody was standing by to save us if our boat did go down.

  I went aft to wake up my crew, and found her sleeping so heavily that turning on the overhead light didn’t arouse her. I suppose I should have told her to change into dry clothes, but she was a strong-minded lady and I doubted she’d have appreciated having a man instruct her how to dress. At any rate she lay on her back on the stripped bunk in her damp jeans and jersey. I regarded her for a moment. In repose, her dark face was softer, almost girlish—it was not the face of a pretty girl, but pretty is a dime a dozen. Well, her looks were fairly irrelevant at the moment. I leaned over her.

  “Wake up, Teresa.” Receiving no response, I shook her gently. “Come on, wake up!”

  Her eyes remained closed. I had a moment of panic, thinking she might have died on me, but investigation showed that she had a steady pulse and was breathing regularly.

  I shook her more roughly. “Up and at ’em, Terry!”

  There was no response. I drew a long breath, realizing at last that I was seeing the little death of total exhaustion: she’d expended too much of herself, during interrogation, in her grim battle against pain. With her iron self-control released at last by a couple of drinks, the machinery had simply shut down for self-repair.

  I lifted her off the mattress as carefully as I could and wedged her into the space between the bunk and the dresser so she wouldn’t be thrown across the cabin if Lorelei III took a bad roll. She did not react in any way to being hauled around. She was so far out that I doubted that even a bucket of cold water would bring her around, and if it did work it might do serious psychological damage. And if it didn’t, it might give her pneumonia. To hell with it; I’d just fight the Battle of Little Pogie Inlet single-handed.

  Returning to the deckhouse, I switched on the white masthead anchor light; I’d be expected to give the Coast Guard something to home in on—something, but not too much, considering the precarious state of my batteries. Then I switched off the autopilot and put the transmission into neutral, leaving the engine idling. In the dark, the exhaust would probably not betray us, and Caselius might get careless, seeing us lying there without any way on, apparently powerless and helpless. I checked the radar and had no trouble finding him, a sizeable blob between us and the shore, moving our way rapidly. His radar was on, throwing odd curving patterns of lines across the screen, and he undoubtedly had a good picture of us, too.

  I went on deck and looked around, thinking I’d never seen such a black and empty night sea. No ships, no stars, no horizon, just an occasional gleaming crest marking a big wave rolling in from the southeast… I sat down to wait, occasionally checking my watch. At last I spotted a flash of whiteness downwind. A few seconds later I caught another on just about the same bearing, and still another. Okay. Gulf Streamer was coming for us in fine style, blasting through the big ocean rollers, throwing lots of spray and, no doubt, giving her passengers a very lumpy ride in spite of her size.

  I rechecked my weapons, as you do—not necessarily a sign of nervousness but, on the other hand, not necessarily not. I returned the shotgun to its clip and retained the rifle, turning on the laser sight and pointing it skyward. I made certain that my superbomb hadn’t slid out of position; but instinct told me that Caselius would be cautious on his first pass no matter how helpless we looked; he wouldn’t come within shotgun range immediately, let alone grenade-pitching range. I’d have to coax him
in somehow…

  Instinct was wrong. He came roaring in quite straight, so I began to wonder if he had kamikaze intentions— his boat was big, but it wasn’t a battleship; it wasn’t big enough to let him ram a husky twelve-ton motor sailer at flank speed without doing fatal damage to his own vessel. But at the last moment, I saw the shadowy, onrushing craft change course a bit, and I realized that I’d goofed badly: this could have been my chance, he was going to pass within half a boatlength. I could have dropped my bundle right into his cockpit—or, if I’d had the shotgun in my hands, I could have blasted him off his flying bridge with a spreading load of buckshot, but in the dark I couldn’t see him clearly enough up there behind all the plastic to put a single rifle bullet where it would do the job.

  There was a man on the foredeck and another in the cockpit. They opened fire at well over fifty yards, but Gulf Streamer’s motion was too violent for them to hit anything at that range with their lousy little squirt guns. At forty yards I heard a couple of bullets strike Lorelei III’s hull. I picked the foredeck man, the easiest target, figuring I’d probably only get one shot before they were past. At thirty yards, I managed to get the red dot on him in spite of the violent motion of the oncoming boat and the rolling deck under my feet. I saw him look down at himself and see red death shining on his shirt; the heavy .338 bullet smashed through him before he could take evasive action. Then, as I was swinging to throw a shot at the cockpit man, moving away rapidly now, Gulf Streamer’s wake hit us.