John Senior waved a hand towards those on the rear deck.
“They spoke to me. It was dangerous and fighting talk but with little forethought,” he said, not taking his eyes off the sea.
I nodded. “You’re right, but my feelings are no different. Those bastards are not going to let us alone. They’ll go after you and your family and that goes for Christopher and Bess as well.”
The old man shook his head, obviously not sure what to do.
“Just look what this fuckin’ boat looks like. What am I going to say to Fergusson? Who is going to pay for this damage?” he asked.
“I’m sure that a guy in Fergusson’s position adequately insures his possessions, this boat included; it’s worth a mint. Remember, you never initiated the fight. We hired the boat from you. You were then attacked at sea. We retaliated, what else was there to do?” I replied and hoped I sounded convincing. “The attack was an act of piracy; the insurers would pay. I’m sure that the insurance policy still provides cover in the event of the boat being out on a charter. However, if not, I would be prepared to pay.”
John Senior guffawed but it was without mirth. “You’ve got to be kidding! Have you got that I kind of money?”
“I’m serious. In fact, I’ll pay you the standard charter fee if we survive this. That’ll make it legit and yes, I can afford to fix the boat, but I’d rather the insurance company does that,” I responded hoping this would convince him.
I again looked over the stern to check on the ‘Moby Dick’.
Shit!
She had increased speed.
Before he could speak, I interrupted him.
“John, forget this discussion, we’re about to get company,” I said.
He swivelled round to look. There was no missing the bone in the cruiser’s teeth as she sped towards us, their intentions obvious.
“Well, that gets me off the hook; I don’t have to make a decision now,” he said resignedly.
“Everybody, get ready! They’re coming!” I shouted.
John Senior spun the helm, the cruiser coming about, and her bow pointing towards the approaching boat. He increased our speed. The two boats had to be closing the distance at a combined speed of about fifty knots.
“Get your launcher ready. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to make a parallel pass keeping about three hundred yards between the boats. The moment I’m nearly directly abeam of them, I’m going to suddenly turn towards them, so it looks as if I intend to ram them.”
The man was wrong!
“John, that’s a mistake. I can’t fire with the bow jumping up and down like that. I nearly missed completely last time,” I protested.
“You’re not going to be in the bow. I want you on the rear deck just behind the cabin on the starboard side. I’m hoping he’ll fire when we are still racing directly towards him, bow on. The bastard will miss - I hope. The moment he has fired, I’m going to swing to port. That’s when you fire. Aim for the bottom of the superstructure where it meets the hull - maybe a foot lower than that, but you don’t want to go too low and accidentally hit the water. Have you got it?” he asked.
Christ, did I have a choice?
“Okay, I hear you. I’ll get ready.”
John Senior steered the boat slightly to port trying to keep us just out of their RPG rocket’s range. As we were about to draw abreast, he came sharply to starboard and pointed our bow directly at the ‘Moby Dick’.
Well, she did exactly what we had done, the boats closing rapidly, but there was one difference; I could see a man had hunkered down on his knee with the RPG over his shoulder, positioned on the deck directly in front of the cabin. The shattered bow gave him an unrestricted arc of fire. All he had to do was wait until we were in range.
“Everybody down,” John Senior screamed. We all threw ourselves flat on the deck.
I could not have been down on the deck on my stomach for a few seconds when the rocket flashed overhead, just missing the cabin, its tail spewing flame. It passed no more than a foot above the gunwale. Had we still had the flying bridge, it would have impacted with the stays or the outriggers, but miraculously, it never hit a thing and continued out to sea behind us.
“Now!” John yelled, the boat coming sharply to port. I rose to my knee, the launcher on my shoulder. Christ! The oncoming boat loomed large in front of me. I was an automaton, responding to pure reflexes. I couldn’t miss. I realized that the boat would pass very close across our stern and if they fired at that range into the back of the boat, it would be the end.
I pulled the trigger. The rocket left the tube and slammed into the “Moby Dick’s hull just behind the cabin about two feet above the water line. There was a tremendous explosion and a massive fireball swept over the boat. The pall of smoke and fire hung over the water behind. The engines had abruptly stopped, but the boat’s forward momentum took it past our stern, slowly, its speed gone.
We stared. The whole of the rear cabin had disappeared, as had half of the rear-deck. I couldn’t see any of the crew. There was a gaping hole in the hull about amidships, the sea pouring in. The centre of the boat was a roaring inferno, the flames fed by diesoline stored in the ruptured tanks.
A figure burst through the flames from the cabin and jumped overboard, his clothes on fire.
I swung round and shouted to John Senior. “Man in the water!”
There was no response, and we continued to move away at a fair speed. I dropped the launcher to the deck and stepped inside the cabin. John Senior was on his knees and slumped against the helm. Blood was pooling on the floor around his knees.
“Johnny,” I called, barely managing to keep my hysteria under control.
“Oh my God!” He rushed forward. Crouching down next to his father, he then took him into his arms and clasped the old man’s upper body to his chest.
There was nothing anybody could do. Either he had been shot or a piece of shrapnel had penetrated his neck, severing or nicking an artery. The blood had pumped from his body with every heartbeat, and this was now a large spreading pool of blood on the cabin floor. I knew that nobody could lose that amount of blood and live.
I stepped nearer and put my fingers on his neck to feel for a pulse. There was none.
“I’m sorry.” I placed my hand on Johnny’s shoulder then reached across and pulled the throttles right back, the gearbox automatically slipping into idle, the cruiser losing its forward momentum, beginning to wallow in the swells.
Bess, Maria and Christopher entered the cabin, nobody saying a word. John was still holding his father. Tears rolled down his cheek.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered again. I turned and walked back to the rear deck.
I looked back at the ‘Moby Dick’. Already her stern was nearly submerged. She was surrounded by floating debris. It was then that I saw a head bobbing in the water and an arm waving.
I walked back into the cabin and took the helm. The others had taken John’s body and laid it down on the cabin bench. I inched the throttles forward and steered us back to the other boat.
‘Moby Dick’s stern had already completely disappeared under water and it was just the bow that pointed at an angle towards the sky. She was about to go. Within minutes, with an eruption of air she slid stern first beneath the waves leaving a legacy of flotsam and diesoline that still burned.
We slowly came alongside the swimmer and Christopher, with the assistance of the two women, hoisted him aboard.
It was Trichardt.
He had lost all his hair, singed off in the flames. He had burns to his face and arms. His clothes were scorched and burnt off in places, revealing further burns to his body. He also had a serious gash just below the knee on the left leg, seeping blood, the white bone visibly broken. The man was in a bad way, in severe pain and going into shock.
> I looked out again over the area where the boat had sunk. Two other bodies floated face down in the water. I continued to scour the area for another few minutes. There were no other survivors.
Eventually I returned to the two bodies to pick them up.
“Don’t.”
I turned to see Maria behind me.
“What do you mean - don’t?” I asked.
“The bodies - leave them. They’re dead. There’s nothing you can do. Their boat has sunk; don’t pick anything up. This has to look like an attack by pirates. We neither captured nor killed anybody. We must leave this scene as soon as possible and continue onto Venezuela. We’ll clean the boat and where possible, remove all traces of the battle. If we are questioned, which I doubt, we say that we lost our flying bridge and outriggers in the storm and that it nearly sunk us. The authorities will know of the near hurricane that passed through the Caribbean and the Gulf. Please Peter, you now have to leave the rest to me, - I know exactly what to do.”
It began to dawn on me what plan she had in mind.
“What about Johnny’s father,” I asked with a croak in my voice.
“We’ve got to give him a burial at sea.” There was no mistaking the determination in her voice. “I know how to handle this. I’ll speak to Johnny.”
“We have to pick up those bodies,” I said again.
“No we don’t - leave them.”
“What about the US Coast Guard, they’ll find the debris and bodies. Their aircraft continually patrol this area looking for cocaine and heroin smugglers.” I insisted.
She shook her head. “This is the Caribbean - the sharks will get them long before they arrive.”
“Christ, that’s fuckin’ callous,” I retorted.
“If we want to get out of this in one piece, not go to jail, and keep the money, then that’s what we have to do. We are fortunate that it happened out here and that none of the lives lost were US citizens; had they been, or had this happened in US waters, it would be all over for us. They’d make sure they got to the bottom of it all. But when not in their jurisdiction, they’re not quite as thorough. Still, there are things we have to do,” she said coldly.
“And Trichardt? How do we explain him?” I asked my voice subdued because I already knew her answer.
“I’m sorry,” she said and slowly shook her head.
What was she telling me?
The shock of it all actually made me feel ill. She was talking about calculated, cold-blooded murder! All along, I knew that this woman had a vicious and uncompromising side to her. You could not get a job like the one she had with the CIA without these attributes: the ability to plan and carry out assassinations were part of their duties against those who were enemies of the state. It must be easy to cross the line, I thought. You needed to be cruel and indurate and be able to kill without conscience. Clearly, she could do all this.
But I still loved this woman. God Almighty! What was I to do? I resolved not to let her do this.
“I’ll go along with leaving the bodies but you don’t touch Trichardt! We’re not going to act like animals - do you hear me?” I said my voice close to a shout, loud enough to make the others turn and look at me. Maria walked away, ignoring me.
I went to inspect Trichardt. Somebody had put shiny gel-like ointment over his burns and placed pieces of gauze over these. They had also covered him with a blanket.
He was unconscious.
“I gave him a morphine injection,” Bess said behind me. “I found the first aid kit.”
“Thanks.” I returned to the helm easing the throttles forward and pointing our bow west towards Venezuela.
John Senior’s body was on the other bench covered by a blanket.
Chapter Forty-One
Christopher, Johnny, and I decided to split the watch between ourselves, and I chose the graveyard watch. We were all exhausted. The supplies on board were meagre, but Bess managed to rustle-up a reasonable supper of tinned meats and vegetables with stale bread, washed down with copious amounts of tea.
We found that about fifteen knots was the most comfortable speed, the pounding of the hull on the waves barely felt.
It was already light, the sun about to rise over the horizon when Bess came up behind me at the helm.
“He’s dead.”
I knew she meant Trichardt.
“Christ! I can’t believe he died - it never looked like his life was threatened.” I was surprised. Certainly, I knew that he had serious burns to his limbs, face, and body but I did not believe them to be so bad as to cause his death.
“Peter, you’ve got remember that he was in shock. The damage to the body, especially in the case of burn wounds, is tremendous, the shock huge. This is usually the cause of death,” she said with a pained expression.
“Where do you know this from?” I asked.
”I was a nurse.”
That surprised me.
Actually, I should’ve felt nothing for the man, but for some reason, a feeling of guilt overcame me. I was not quite prepared to accept that he had died. Maria’s last discussion with me when she indicated that Trichardt could not be permitted to survive, bothered me. Fleetingly, I imagined her in the middle of the night, creeping up to the drugged Trichardt on his bunk and surreptitiously administering some lethal injection. As I said, the thought was only a fleeting one, but the mere fact that I considered this indicated that I would not have put such a deed beyond her.
Maria spoke to Johnny and had explained the possible consequences if we were to arrive in Venezuela with the bodies of Trichardt and his father aboard. Johnny’s father was a victim of the recent storm, she said. He had been washed overboard when we were struck by a rogue wave. She convinced him that we had to say that the body was never found. For this reason, we had to bury him at sea.
And we would have to deal with Trichardt’s body in a similar manner.
She clearly had been very convincing, and Johnny accepted that she was right. He wrapped his father’s body in an emergency sail together with a few unessential metal items he found in the engine room, using them to weigh the body down. He did the same with Trichardt’s body, with Maria helping him, neither of them displaying quite the same degree of respect to him as they had allotted to Johnny’s father.
With the bodies lying on the bench on the rear deck, Johnny said a prayer over his father. He and Christopher then gently lowered the body into the water. It immediately sank.
Trichardt was rolled overboard. Interestingly, everyone had also said another short prayer.
I waited ten minutes before I started the engines and resumed our voyage. Shortly thereafter, I gave the helm to Johnny, as he wanted to be alone with his thoughts and I crawled into a bunk.
I awoke an hour or so after midday. Maria handed me a cup of tea. With the cup in my hand, I joined Johnny at the helm. He seemed to have recovered from the ordeal of the burial and had come to terms with the loss of his father.
“An hour or two ago, a US navy patrol aircraft flew over us,” he said.
“Do you think it was a routine patrol?” I asked.
“It could have been or maybe it was searching for the ‘Moby Dick’. I don’t think it was looking for us because nobody really knew of our departure and therefore, wouldn’t report us missing. When they flew over us, we did not warrant a look-see, they just ignored us. I’m sure there is a search and rescue out, although I’ve no idea who would have alerted the authorities. Maybe someone in the Caymans.”
“Christ, I think the crap is about to hit the fan. Make sure everybody’s got their stories down pat. You know, the rogue wave tearing off the flying bridge structure, the debris still attached to the boat by the cables and the boat unable to properly right itself, forcing us to remain stationary in the water and us unable to search for those washed over
board until we had cut the boat free,” I rattled off frantically. “You then discovering that Bess and I had also been washed overboard and you then rescuing us - has everyone got that straight?”
Without taking his eyes off the horizon, Johnny spoke. “God, Peter, I still can’t believe the events of the last few days. Maria was right. What we did was the only way to deal with it. If asked, we don’t know a damn thing about the ‘Moby Dick’. Why are you aboard? Because you and Maria wanted to be taken to Venezuela. As far as Bess and Christopher are concerned, they are close island friends of mine. Of course, bloody Whittle will never believe that story, but what can he do? Hopefully, the loss of life attributed to the ‘Moby Dick’ and its loss at sea will be accepted. I know that Whittle will be sceptical, but I’ve the feeling he won’t make too much of it. Victims of the storm, that’s what. He’ll consider it a favour from above; Carruthers no longer being a problem for him.”
“I’m truly sorry about your old man,” I said placing a hand on his shoulder.
“Thanks.” That was all he said.
I sat on the bench on the open deck with Maria next to me, her head on my shoulder.
“It’s all working out,” she said.
“Yes,” I replied quietly. She was right, although I was still concerned that our explanations would not satisfy the authorities.
“Can you imagine the headlines. ‘South African business tycoon disappears in the Caribbean’ or something to that effect. I’m sure his organisation would send people out to investigate and what about his jet on the airport at Cayman Brac? Is the pilot still waiting there? The police will have to initiate a search. There are still a lot of unanswered questions. Fortunately, there is no proof. Although we do know that Whittle has a fair idea of what has been going on.”
She pondered my reply for a while.
“What happened to Johnny’s father is tragic and so is the loss of the hotel,” Maria said. “We need to discuss this with Gavin and maybe think about some sort of compensation. Christ, we’ve got enough money now.”
Diamonds Are But Stone Page 30
