The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

  I should have anticipated it, of course. In our previous nautical encounter, wake hadn’t been much of a problem: a light sportboat, planing on top of the water, doesn’t dig that big a hole. However, coming down the waterway, I’d become acquainted with the uncomfortable wakes of some rude powerboat characters who hadn’t slowed down very much in passing—to be fair, most of them had been quite considerate—but few had been as big as Gulf Streamer and none had been traveling as fast. I never got the shot away. I saw the tidal wave coming at us broadside and managed to get an arm around the mizzenmast; then Lorelei III was thrown over to starboard until I was sure the mast was going to hit the water—and as she struggled upright, she fell into the ditch the big sportfisherman had plowed in the water and rolled clear over the other way.

  She came up again bravely, but out in the darkness the dim white shape of Gulf Streamer was coming around in a hard right turn. Deliberately using his wake as a weapon, Caselius obviously intended to return and give us another dose while we were still making like a mad pendulum and unable to do any accurate shooting. Okay, Ronnie, I told him silently, just make it nice and close again, amigo; I have something for you…

  I’d managed to hang on to the rifle. I slammed it into its bracket and found my secret weapon, which had slid across the boat. I braced myself against the deckhouse while I pulled out the cork a bit and let gasoline leak onto the strip of khaki cloth. I rammed the cork home again and stood there waiting, not wanting to show a warning flame prematurely; besides, I wasn’t going to hold a burning gasoline-and-dynamite torch any longer than I had to. The big sportfisherman was charging us again, like an angry bull. I had my finger on the lighter trigger, when Lorelei III’s transmission snapped into gear and she started to move and swing…

  “No!” I shouted. Hell, I’d had him coming in just right! I raced down the side deck and yelled into the deckhouse, “Damn it, Terry, no! Engine neutral! Rudder amidships!”

  Turning, I saw that Gulf Streamer was almost on top of us. Apparently our slight movement hadn’t been detected. There was no time to reach the aft deck; I braced myself between the rail and the deckhouse and snapped the trigger. The cloth exploded into fire instantly—and so did my hand, which had apparently received some gas spillage. The man on Gulf Streamer’s foredeck was gone; his body had apparently been jolted overboard. The one in the cockpit, leaning out to shoot past the cabin, seemed to be firing right into my face, but the motion was too much for him: a bullet hit the hull just below my feet, another thwacked through the safety glass of the deckhouse window at my shoulder, but nothing hit me. Then the cockpit was right there, and I tossed my bundle into it—and tucked my hand under my armpit to put out the fire.

  I had a glimpse of the dark-faced man turning to stare at the flaming object. Apparently he’d been negatively conditioned to Molotov cocktails; after a stunned moment, he simply dropped his machine pistol and dove overboard to join his dead colleague.

  The man-made tsunami hit us again and rolled us damn near ninety degrees to starboard and then only a little less to port. I hung on, watching the big sportfisherman rush away from us. There was a flickering light in the cockpit: the burning fuse. The white water under the stern diminished a bit as Caselius hauled back his throttles; then, presumably leaving the boat on autopilot, he was dropping down the ladder from the flying bridge. He made a dim target, receding rapidly. I grabbed the big Browning and tried to put the red spot on him, got him for an instant, and fired, but there was too much motion at both ends and the bullet went wild.

  I was still bracing myself for an explosion over there, but nothing happened—except that the wavering light in the cockpit was dying. Then it was replaced by a definite pinpoint of flame as Caselius lifted my bomb into view; it made a delicate arc of light when he threw it overboard, that seemed to persist for several seconds after the flame was extinguished by the water. Okay, so I wasn’t an explosives genius after all.

  At the distance, in the dark, I could barely make out Caselius clambering back up the ladder to the big sportfisherman’s flying-bridge controls; but I thought I saw him pause to give me a friendly salute in appreciation of my failed homicidal effort, as one good sportsman to another.

  I grimaced and moved to the deckhouse door and started to speak to the woman at the wheel.

  “Sorry I had to yell at you, Terry…” I stopped.

  “Surprise, surprise,” said little Lori Fancher.

  29

  Gulf Streamer had disappeared into the darkness. A glance at the radar showed her to be making a big sweep to windward for some reason; but there was nothing I could do about that. With the faster boat by far, Caselius had the initiative. My secret weapon having failed, I’d just have to tailor my defense to whatever attack he decided to make next. Meanwhile, since he was giving me a little time, I could spend it finding out what the hell was going on on board my own ship.

  The girl at the wheel had no business being there, and she certainly had no business wearing one of my few white dress shirts. The garment covered her like a tent, which was a good thing, since she didn’t seem to be wearing much else.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she said, rolling up a long sleeve that was getting in the way.

  “The shirt? Be my guest.”

  “What do I do when that overgrown marlin chaser comes back?”

  I said, “We’ll keep on playing dead—well, dead in the water—until we see a good reason to let him know we’ve got power. Just stand ready to give it everything; I’ll let you know when.”

  “I’m sorry I almost loused you up,” she said. “I was trying to be helpful. I didn’t realize… What did you throw at them?”

  I told her. “But apparently the damn bottle didn’t break, hitting that nice soft teak. Or maybe the dynamite cushioned it.”

  “Some cushion,” she said dryly. “I thought that stuff was fairly sensitive. At least you aren’t supposed to toss it around unnecessarily, are you, or smack it with a hammer?”

  I frowned. “I wonder where our friend has got to? He’s fresh out of crew, but I doubt that he’s quit on that account, or gone back ashore for more men. Apparently, he’s got none of his DAMAG goons handy; he’s using Dorothy’s Arab creeps.” I stepped up on the side deck and looked all around, seeing nothing in the darkness but an occasional whitecap. I dropped back down into the deckhouse. “Okay, so how the hell did you get aboard?”

  She said, “Not just me, skipper. You have another passenger up forward you didn’t know about, but he’s dead. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer sex maniac.”

  I remembered hearing some activity on board while Teresa and I were waiting for Caselius to fasten the cabin door shut; apparently it had been decided to bury all available bodies in the same thirty-eight-foot coffin.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  She said, “Well, they had me tied hand and foot on the other boat, and then they let Curly Bill Barstow at me. He thought it was just great, having me so humiliatingly helpless, after the way I’d slapped him down earlier. Do you want to know something, Matt? I don’t think bondage is ever going to be a big thing in my life. The creep had lots of preliminary fun, deliberately destroying my clothes so he could get them off me, rag by rag, without untying me. When he had me deliciously naked and still helplessly bound, there was something he… he wanted me to do to him, you can guess what. He hit me a couple of times by way of persuasion, and then that woman stepped quietly into the stateroom behind him— he never even knew she was there—and put a pistol to the back of his head and blew him away, ugh! Not that I was complaining at the moment. They hauled the bodies, living and dead, over to this boat and dumped them into the forward cabin and closed the door. I kept trying to attract somebody’s attention, but nobody heard me, way up there in the bow. Finally the boat took a real knockdown and threw me across the stateroom so hard it almost scrambled my brains… Shouldn’t you be out on deck, doing something constructive?”

  “Like what?” I asked
. “The guns are ready. When he comes back, I’ll just shoot him. Simple. I should have thought of it sooner.”

  She shrugged. “Well, all right… That masthead anchor light shining down through the clear plastic hatch gave me a little light up there, and when I came out of my daze; I saw that a strip of teak sheathing had got knocked loose where I hit, and there was a tricky little knife hidden behind it, just as if somebody’d known I’d need one.”

  I said, “Well, it wasn’t exactly meant for you, but you’re welcome.”

  She went oh. “I cut myself free and went looking for something to wear… What’s the matter with your lady friend in the aft cabin? She seems to be either drugged or in kind of a coma.”

  I said, “She had a very rough time.”

  “Yes, I saw the bandage… Matt, there’s a searchlight!”

  The beam was working about a hundred yards to windward. After studying it briefly, I said, “Caselius must have come around to look for the guy who jumped overboard. If he locked his loran when it happened… Okay, he’s got the man, dammit.”

  More lights had come on over there, enough to show us the shape of the big white sportfisherman as it maneuvered to make the pickup. It had to be a tricky job for one man handling sixty feet of powerboat; and just locating the man in the water had been a neat piece of seamanship. I wished to God we were playing our lethal games out in the kind of Western country I knew something about. This nautical nonsense gave me a terrible inferiority complex. The fact that I was pitting one eighty-horsepower power plant against two nine-hundreds didn’t help.

  I said, “Well, let’s hope the Diving Desperado over there picked up a bad case of hypothermia and is shivering too hard to hold a gun.”

  Lori looked at me with instinctive disapproval; a man overboard was supposed to become, automatically, an object of sympathy. I yearned for the other Lori, the one who’d once warned me that just because certain people had got all wet didn’t mean they’d become nice people, but that was the girl she didn’t want to be.

  She started to speak, but checked herself. She just said, “Well, here he comes; you’d better get out there and shoot him like you said… Matt.”

  “Yes?”

  There was an odd little glint in her eyes, almost a look of anticipation. Maybe the Lori I wanted—needed here— wasn’t so far away, after all.

  She licked her lips. “It’s… well, kind of déjà vu, isn’t it? We’ve been here before.”

  I said, “Keep the faith, tigress.”

  The big sportfisherman was coming at us again, from astern, clearly planning to sweep down the port side; and something had changed. The plastic curtains of the flying bridge had been removed. Back at the topside station, I grabbed the .338. I managed to find the oncoming white hull with the laser sight and swung the unsteady weapon upward. I saw the red dot, wide and weak at such long range, waver across first one face up there and then another; I tried to hold on the left-hand one, slightly closer, and pressed the trigger. The fireworks were again impressive, as was the recoil, but I knew I’d missed.

  So Caselius had his gunner with him up on the flying bridge this time—perhaps he didn’t trust the man out of reach. I slammed the rifle back into its bracket and grabbed the shotgun. Now a machine pistol was firing up there. I swung the dim barrel of the twelve-gauge upward. Something rapped my hip lightly; Caselius’s boy had got lucky. I pumped all six shotgun shells through the action as Gulf Streamer swept past—there’s a lot of loose talk about wicked dangerous terrible semiautomatics, but the simple fact is that a good man with a slide-action shotgun can pump it faster than any corresponding self-loader can shuck its own shells through its deliberate, automatic action.

  Then we were knocked onto our beam ends again, and Caselius was in a hard left turn ahead, coming back to take advantage of his own mountainous wake. I could feel blood running down my hip, and my right hand smarted a bit where it had been burned earlier, but I didn’t think the bullet had done more than graze me, and the gasoline hadn’t flamed long enough to do any serious skin damage. I didn’t try the rifle on this pass; time was short, and I was busy refilling the magazine of the shotgun.

  I stepped forward. “Lori! Hit him with the searchlight!”

  The little girl was on the ball; the powerful beam lanced out almost immediately. I crouched in the shelter of the deckhouse, waiting for the range to close. There was only one head up on the flying bridge now, and it had to be Caselius; his diving-type crewman would have fled if I’d got his boss. Caselius, alone, was steering with his knees, or maybe he’d set the autopilot; somehow he’d managed to free his hands for shooting. Muzzle flame lanced out, and I heard bullets striking Lorelei III although the range was still long. I rose, preparing to shoot, and something hit my left side a heavy blow. It knocked the wind out of me, like being struck by a baseball bat.

  Gasping, I saw our searchlight waver downward for a moment. I hoped it didn’t mean that Lori had also been hit; friend Roland seemed to be a lot better marksman than his borrowed gofers. Then I glimpsed something that drove the thought, and the pain, from my mind: incredibly the searchlight had picked out, tumbling in the sportfisherman’s curling bow wave, a bundle of yellow sticks and a green bottle—apparently we’d drifted into the area where Caselius had jettisoned my present, and there had been enough air in the bottle to keep the thing afloat.

  There was no time to think. I just took the snapshot at forty yards, as if I’d seen a grouse flashing through an opening in the woods. It couldn’t work, of course. It was a small mark, and at that range a charge of 00 buck, designed for deer-sized targets, formed a very loose pattern, and I wasn’t even sure that the impact of a single buckshot…

  The Atlantic Ocean turned itself inside out over there. For a moment there was nothing but a wall of white water in the glare of the searchlight. Then Gulf Streamer came blasting through it like a picture I’d once seen of the great old-fashioned battleships charging through the artillery waterspouts at the Battle of Jutland. I’ll never know if the explosion damage had turned her, or if Caselius had spun the wheel deliberately; at any rate she was heading straight for us.

  I shouted. “Lori! Full ahead! Hard right rudder!”

  But the kid had already reacted to the threat. I had to steady myself as the old motor sailer lurched into motion. It was too late, of course. I had one final glimpse of Gulf Streamer with a large hole in her port bow and most of the glass blown out of her cabin and her tuna tower listing drunkenly; then the two boats came together with a violent crash. In the kickback from our searchlight, I saw a human body slingshotted out of the sportfisherman’s damaged flying bridge by the impact; it struck the top of our deckhouse and bounced off into the sea.

  I’d been thrown into the mizzen shrouds. The wrench brought alive the dormant pain of my wound. It took a moment to blaze through my body like wildfire; I kept waiting for it to peak and subside…

  “Matt, wake up!”

  “Who’s asleep?” I mumbled. The flames of agony were actually dying a little. I seemed to be flat on the deck. I tried to rise. It wasn’t easy. “Give me a hand, Lori…”

  Then I opened my eyes and saw Teresa Bell kneeling beside me. I just couldn’t seem to keep my boating dames straight.

  “We’re sinking,” Teresa said. “The Fancher kid woke me up; sorry I passed out like that. She’s getting the life raft overboard. She sent me to help you…”

  A heavy splash aft interrupted her. We both looked that way.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked.

  “I’d better take a look.” Teresa left me and came back. Her face was expressionless. “It’s your Mr. Caselius, hanging onto the stern ladder. He seems to be in bad shape. I guess he tried to climb up and fell back in. What do I do?”

  “Help me up… Oh, Jesus!”

  Remembering her stoicism, I was embarrassed by the noise I was making about a lousy little bullet wound. With her help, I made it to my knees, but at first the standing position s
eemed unattainable; then I made that, too. I stumbled aft and looked over the rail. The white face of Roland Caselius looked up at me. There was, of course, no plea for mercy; we both knew what had to come next. I took out the little .38 Special, but I was having a hard time just staying on my feet, and the weapon wouldn’t steady on the target. Somebody nudged my arm. I looked at Teresa Bell. She was holding out her hand for the gun.

  “If you want me to.”

  I passed it to her. She took deliberate aim and fired. Caselius seemed to hang there for a moment longer; then he slid down into the surging water astern. One of his hands gave an odd little flip as he disappeared, like the jaunty salutes he’d given me from time to time.

  Mrs. Teresa Bell tucked my pistol back into its wet holster and helped me turn around. Lori was standing there, clinging to the mizzen rigging, staring at us as if we were both perfectly horrible people. Which of course we were.

  30

  I’m not going to apologize to the U.S. Coast Guard for my previous attitude, but I will say that the boys and girls seem to be good at what they do, even if some of what they do isn’t worth doing. If they’d concentrate on being a great rescue service and forget about being web-footed drug hunters I might even get to like them.

  Anyway, they found us in our floating doughnut and picked us up expertly and got us ashore expeditiously, after which the medical profession took over my case. Well, I’d been there before. The Beaufort hospital didn’t seem very different from others I’d inhabited, except for the pleasant, but sometimes incomprehensible, southern accents.

  Lori Fancher came to see me after my situation had been stabilized—at least I heard somebody telling somebody I was stable. I suppose it was good news. Lori was in one of her long-john costumes; this time the snug tights and big sweater were kelly green. She brought an armload of flowers.

  She got them taken care of first; then she came to the bed and looked down at me for a long time without speaking, and said at last, “They tell me the bullet smashed a rib, a splinter of which punctured a lung, but you’re going to live anyway. Of course, after what I saw on the boat, I can’t help wondering if that’s really such a good idea, Matt.” Then she said quickly, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t wish anybody dead.”