Diamonds Are But Stone

by Peter Vollmer

  The twin diesel engines speeded up, the cruiser swinging to starboard and changing course to intercept us. It approached rapidly, its bow wave a fluorescent white bone in its teeth. The picture was ominous: I was sure they proposed to ram us.

  “For fuck’s sake! Start the engines,” I shouted.

  It must have taken five to ten seconds to get both engines started. The moment the motors fired, Johnny rammed the dual throttles forward, and the ski-boat’s bow shot out of the water as the propellers bit, Maria and I wildly flailing our arms looking for handholds as we fell backwards. As we surged forward, the cruiser changed direction to maintain an interception course, rapidly closing the gap.

  The ski-boat was more nimble but could not match the cruiser’s speed, not in the choppy sea.

  John Senior shouted. “Wait...! Don’t turn away yet!”

  “Old man, don’t interfere, I’ve got this under control. The bastard’s trying to ram us. Get the life jackets out from the spray cabin - hand them out!” Johnny screamed at his father.

  Just as the cruiser was upon us, Johnny swung the ski-boat to port passing along the portside of the cruiser in the opposite direction, the combined speed of the boats leaving the two boats abeam of each other for mere seconds.

  But as the boats came abeam, shots rang out from the cruiser, and holes suddenly appeared in the fibreglass spray cabin. Then they were gone, and we were heading out to sea with the cruiser laboriously swinging around in pursuit.

  Christ! I hauled the Sauer 9mm from behind my back and fired off two shots in the direction of the cruiser. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Maria take up a shooter’s stance, both hands gripping her automatic as she fired three quick shots in succession. I had no doubt that these had struck their target; she was a professional, trained at Langley, I remembered.

  I looked round to see if everybody was all right. Johnny had been hit, the injury high in the shoulder. It looked to me like a flesh wound, but there seemed to be a lot of blood.

  I realized we could not spend the night trying to avoid the cruiser. I was certain that they had more men aboard and had yet to bring their full firepower to bear. Next time it would be a fusillade.

  We were living on borrowed time - they had the edge in terms of speed and while we could avoid and outmanoeuvre them, they would always return to be near enough to get off a few shots.

  I moved closer to Johnny. “Are you managing?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Listen,” I said. “We can’t go on like this. I want you to run as close to the shore as you can, but run parallel to the waves. Maria and I will jump overboard and swim for the shore; - with the lifejackets, we’ll be fine. You’ve got to get yourself to the hospital. Once ashore, I’ll alert the police, not giving my name but I’ll tell them as much as I can, okay?”

  Johnny just stared at me. “Don’t do that - just get away. Leave the police out of it. I’ll handle this.” He clutched his shoulder. John Senior had taken over the helm, always letting the cruiser approach and then swinging away at the last moment.

  Again, two shots rang out from the cruiser, and we all ducked.

  “God, at this rate it won’t be long before someone’s hit again,” Maria said.

  “Maria! Do you want to jump with me?” I asked.

  She grabbed my hand. “I’ll jump with you. Just hang onto your automatic.”

  With his good arm, Johnny grabbed my shoulder. “Look... look!” he exclaimed, pointing out to sea. “There’s another boat and it’s turned towards us.”

  He was right. A large fishing boat with a high bow, a mast amidships and a large cabin on the stern approached from the sea. It too showed no lights. I thought it had to be the fishing boat that had trailed us at a distance after leaving the harbour.

  “Christ! It’s the Fisheries boat,” John Senior exclaimed. “What the hell is it doing here?”

  Suddenly the fishing boat lit up, both the navigational lights as well as two deck spreader lights. They cast a harsh light over the for’ard deck. The men on the deck were clearly visible.

  “Christ! It’s the bloody police!” Johnny cried.

  The cruiser veered away from the fishing boat, probably seeing the police aboard. It turned east, increasing its speed, the forward part of the hull out of the water, the bow ploughing into the swells as it sped away.

  John Senior brought the ski-boat around until it was running parallel to the coast just beyond the surf line, the shore no more than a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards away. I looked at Maria; she nodded. I let myself fall backwards overboard, and she did the same.

  The shock of the cold water momentarily took my breath away, but in a second or two, I had recovered. I looked around and found Maria a few yards away. I checked whether I still had the Sauer 9mm. We closed up and struck out towards the shore.

  Fifteen minutes later after being pummelled a few times by waves and fighting the backwash, my feet eventually touched the coarse coral bottom. I was exhausted.

  But Maria and I had stayed together. I grabbed her hand as we waded ashore, gasping for air, coughing, and spluttering. I stumbled up the beach, my legs like rubber. Maria seemed to have fared better than I had. She was obviously in better shape than I!

  We collapsed on the sand above the high water mark and looked out to sea. The cruiser had sped off, no longer to be seen. The ski-boat was now alongside the fishing boat. I hoped the islanders would be able to talk their way out of any predicament. I had said to them that they should stay as close to the truth as they could. That was always a good policy. I couldn’t foresee a problem - they had done nothing illegal. Johnny’s wound was clearly caused by a gunshot but there’d be no indication that fire had been returned. Of course, the question would be asked why they’d been fired at. I left that to Johnny to handle, just glad that we’d got away.

  “Are you okay?” Maria asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Merde, you’re not very fit. I should’ve made you run a few miles every day on the beach.” She rose from the sand, grabbed my hand, and pulled me up. “Come on, let’s go.”

  We slowly climbed the incline from the beach moving towards the tropical vegetation’s growth line. I was surprised. We found an un-tarred road, well worn, which followed the coastline, disappearing into the few gnarled and windswept trees to avoid large coral outcrops.

  I thought we had to be about a half-mile from the airport’s perimeter fence. We had no landmarks and the only way was to move north. Maria appeared to know the way. It had to be her training again. What else did they teach these people, I asked myself?

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Whittle grabbed the microphone from its bracket on the Land Rover’s dashboard and brought it to his mouth depressing the transmit button.

  “Cayman Three, Cayman Three. Come in,” he called.

  Cayman Three responded.

  “What’s happening? You last said you were approaching both boats. I need to know,” Whittle said loudly.

  “The big cruiser broke off its engagement as soon as they saw that there were police aboard our boat. It turned tail and seemed to be heading back to Rebecca Cove; that is normally its home base. We now have the ski-boat alongside. There are two known islanders aboard - the McNamara’s from Bamboo Bay. The family looks after the Fergusson’s bungalow and their boats in his absence. They say they were out on a fishing trip. We found a few 9mm shell casings rolling around on the boat’s floorboard. Somebody aboard must have fired shots, but we could find no weapons. The MacNamaras say these are old casings from when they had let off some shots at sharks that were attacking the fish they were trying haul aboard.”

  Whittle knew it was a lie. “Bullshit....,standby.”

  Empty shell casings? Then it was shooting he had heard. Who had been shooting at whom? Where were the weapons? Had they thrown the gun
s overboard? He remembered that during the last radio communication with the fishing boat, the police officer on board had said he thought he could see four persons. Now there were only two. What happened to the others?

  “Cayman Three, can you see anybody on the beach?”

  “No, it’s too dark,” came the reply through the loudspeaker.

  Whittle turned to the driver who was studying the wing mirror on his right. “Come on. Let’s move further up the coast to where the road gets closer to the sea. I want to look at something.

  The driver turned from the mirror. “Superintendent, sir, there’s another vehicle coming up behind us. He’s still quite away from us, but I can see his lights dipping up and down.”

  “Turn of your lights,” Whittle snapped.

  Suddenly they were shrouded in darkness. For a moment, neither could see a thing as they waited for their eyes to adjust.

  “Pull off the road into the trees,” he said to the driver.

  Gingerly the driver inched the van off the road. He then selected four-wheel drive and drove over a few plants and bushes as the vehicle penetrated the dense vegetation of a bamboo grove. When they thought they could no longer be seen, they stopped. A minute or so later a sedan drove past on the road behind them. It didn’t even slow down, the occupants obviously not seeing the hidden Land Rover.

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “That looked like the car those guys we saw at the harbour were driving - Carruthers’s men,” the driver respectfully volunteered.

  Whittle remembered. “You sure, Carruthers’s crowd?”

  The driver affirmed this.

  What the hell was going on, he asked himself. Carruthers’s men seemed relentless in their pursuit of this couple. What was the reason? No thefts and no murders had been reported, in fact, the island was unusually quiet. It was obvious that somehow the couple featured high in the order of things: this was probably due to the extent of the reward, which the police had confirmed was on offer for their capture - either dead or alive.

  He was sure that the couple were on the ski-boat and must have jumped ship. Had they swam ashore? That would have been a relatively easy feat. Why was the car here? The occupants must have been looking for them ashore somewhere here.

  Here, twenty to thirty feet above the sea, the wind, which had freshened, was unimpeded, its strength buffeting the van.

  “Okay, let’s proceed along the road. Please, no lights and keep a sharp lookout for the other car.”

  Both men had drawn weapons from the armoury at the police station, and were each armed with a .38 Star revolver. Whittle carried his in a shoulder holster, wearing a windbreaker over it.

  The Land Rover moved rapidly forward and they soon picked up the rear lights of the car in front.

  “Keep a fair distance behind them. I don’t want them to hear us.” The driver slowed down.

  Out at sea, the fishing boat still lay with its lights ablaze and the ski-boat alongside. He got on the radio and instructed the fishing boat to escort the ski-boat back to the harbour.

  “The ski-boat crew are not to leave the harbour until I’ve had spoken to them, which will only be during the course of tomorrow,” he said irritably, “What are they saying about the cartridge casings they had rolling around in the boat? Are they still sticking to that bloody stupid story?”

  “They say they say that these are from trying to kill sharks. It’s a lie - the casings aren’t even corroded.”

  “And the guns?”

  “They’re Fergussons’.., or so they say.”

  “Liars.”

  Chapter Thirty

  The wind from the east, which had freshened earlier, rustled the long leaves of the bamboo stalks in the interspersed grooves that bordered the shoreline. The car approached from the east, the wind carrying its sound, so we heard it before it came into view. We saw the approaching halo of its headlights from afar as it moved on the track that bordered the coast.

  Suddenly its lights were extinguished, but the car still approached. Who was this? I asked myself. Lovers looking for a quiet place to park? Why switch off the lights and still keep driving?

  I grabbed Maria hand and pulled her towards the scrub and bamboo thickets.

  “Come on; into the bamboo.”

  We sprinted across the road, threw ourselves into the scrub, and then crawled deeper into the vegetation and bamboo stalks. This was not as dense as it had seemed; there were bare patches between the thickets, with the vegetation consisting of sparse long-bladed grass.

  “Lie still!” I whispered fiercely.

  The car had stopped, the engine switched off. I could hear the crunch of shoes on the corral shale. The shale was a godsend; all over the island, this coral shale was the ground underfoot, making it virtually impossible to sneak up without some telltale sound.

  Peering low through the bamboo thicket where the stalks were devoid of leaves, we saw three men slowly walking down the track towards our position, their attention focussed on the vegetation to their right. The moonlight glinted on the guns all three had drawn.

  They stopped about ten yards from us. The fishing boat was still out at sea, straight across the beach. I recognized Rockell: he was obviously in charge of this small group of black men, clearly members of Carruthers’s crowd.

  “They’ve got to be around here. Look, this is where they came ashore,” I heard Rockell say. He had moved towards the beach and descended a few yards down the loose shale slope. “See, here are their footprints in the sand.” He bent over, staring at the ground.

  “Spread out, we’ll enter this bush in a line. If you see anything, don’t hesitate, just shoot,” he said.

  Maria squeezed my hand, then pulled my face towards her and hissed into my ear.

  “They can’t miss us - they’re going to walk right into us. We must shoot before they do; it’s our only chance. When I stand, it’s my signal to shoot. Don’t wait for me, get up, find a target, and shoot. Just make sure you’ve got a target.”

  My blood froze. When I was given the automatic, I had not actually considered using it. Now she was saying that we needed to kill them before they killed us! That we had no alternative but to kill first.

  God! This was serious close combat stuff she was suggesting - you do not miss when you this close but then neither do the enemy.

  I pulled the Sauer from my pants and slowly and quietly released the safety catch, the gun already cocked and a cartridge in the chamber.

  Someone approached my position stealthily; I heard the sound as he brushed foliage aside as he moved forward the coral ground crunching. It was impossible to move in these thickets without making some sound. It was not entirely dark; the moon was providing some light, making our surroundings discernible. Suddenly, the bush in front of us parted. My eyes never left the movement but in my peripheral vision, I saw Maria rise. I was still trying to follow her cue and rise from my prone position, when the first shots were fired. As I came up, I glimpsed somebody to my right swinging his weapon towards me. In an instant, I had the automatic aligned and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked in my hand, the ejected cartridge shell glinting in the moonlight as it spun past my head. Simultaneously, I saw a spurt of flame from the other’s gun. A numbing shock hit me in the right hip. I swivelled around completely from the impact. I heard other shots fired, some from right next to me and I realized Maria was still shooting.

  I heard a loud oomph from alongside me and saw Maria double-up and collapse to the ground. The first shot I had fired had hit the man in the chest; he was knocked backwards, not rising. I also had seen Maria’s first shot bring down a man. Both had been black, which meant that Rockell still had to be around somewhere. I knew I had been hit but the pain had yet to register. My mind was still driven by the adrenalin in my system, the shock still to come.

&nb
sp; I couldn’t see Rockell. I sunk to my knees and looked down at Maria who was lying on her stomach, her one arm thrown out at an angle, the other under her body. Carefully, I rolled her over; she was limp. The bullet had penetrated her stomach on her upper right side. The entry hole left me in no doubt that she must have sustained internal injuries; there were vital organs in that part of the abdominal cavity. She was losing blood internally, as there was very little blood seeping from the wound.

  “Maria! Are you okay?” I heard myself shout. A stupid question considering the wound she had incurred, but I was in a state of panic.

  She groaned. I realized the shot must have knocked the wind out of her. She groaned again.

  “I’m hit,” she whispered hoarsely.

  “I know. Just lie still. You’re going to be okay. Don’t move until I get back.” I left her before she could reply, crawling away from her but staying in the bamboo thicket, trying to make as little noise as possible, hoping that the bamboo leaves that rustled in the wind would cloak any sounds I made. After a few minutes, I stopped and lay still, looking, and listening for anything that seemed unusual. Rockell was still around; I dare not stand and present him with a target. He had to be nearby.

  I heard another car draw up on the road and then the slamming of doors followed by the noise of people moving through the scrub and bamboo, not attempting to disguise their approach.

  A shout suddenly rang out. “Police - don’t move!”

  My first thought was Maria. The police would do their utmost to get Maria to where she could receive medical attention.

  “Over here,” I yelled. I heard the snapping of twigs and the rustle of leaves as they rushed towards me. Two men suddenly emerged, the one dressed in a Caymanian police uniform.

  I stood up and raised my arms. “Over here,” I shouted again.

  They approached, cautiously, their revolvers drawn as if expecting something to happen.

  “They’re gone,” I said. “But my girlfriend has been shot.”