by Tom Clancy
But such thoughts had no place in his mind during a run. A touch annoyed with himself for letting them enter it, Morpaign had watched his laborers boost the casks of rum atop the pushcarts, lash them securely together to prevent any from toppling over, and then roll them out into the passage. There they joined Didier and the others, who had left the second chamber with their own creaking, weighted-down carts.
Morpaign brought up the rear as they continued on into the tunnel, bumping through its curves and bends by the trembling light of Didier’s lantern.
Half an hour passed before they began their climb to the surface. Morpaign felt a trickle of ocean breeze against his cheek and knew they were nearing the tunnel’s outlet, a limestone cave worn into the hills above the beach by time, weather, and constantly percolating groundwater.
The passage floor soon grew steeper and less uneven, the dirt underfoot giving way to a sort of natural stone ramp. The slaves put their backs to hauling the loads the rest of the way up, pushing at the carts with increased effort.
They had been toiling over this last hump, the cave mouth just ahead, when Morpaign noticed an odd red-orange glow staining the patch of sky visible beyond its rough circle. While seemingly at a distance, it was brighter by far than the moonlight . . . bright enough to render Didier’s upraised lantern unnecessary.
Puzzled, Morpaign stopped flatfooted. The workers had also come to a sudden halt, jamming the passage before him, the wheels of their heavy carts ceasing to turn and rattle over its bare rock floor. Didier stood slightly below its exit sniffing the air.
Morpaign found himself doing the same. A thick, acrid stench had mingled with the smell of sea salt filtering underground.
“Smoke,” Didier said. He sniffed again, wiped his nose with his calloused knuckles. “From a great fire, I’d say.”
Morpaign gave no comment. The fool had stated the profoundly obvious. Something was burning. Something large. Not on the hills, or the beach, but beyond, upon the water.
He scuffed past the slaves and barrel carts, ignoring his own policy of address to urge them out of his way, heedless of soiling his fashionable coat against the cave wall.
“Move aside,” he said. “All of you, aside now.”
Pushing his ample frame around Didier, he hurried up the remaining few feet to the tunnel’s mouth, left it a step ahead of the overseer.
The sight he encountered outside the cave stole the breath from his lungs.
Just ahead of him, Javier and Leon lay sprawled on their backs near the horse carriage, blood sheeting over their faces from ugly gaping wounds between their eyes. Perhaps ten or twelve coarse, bearded men in short jackets and sailor’s slops ringed the wagon in a loose knot. All of them were armed with cutlasses—some of the blades drawn, some still in belt scabbards at their sides—and a few shouldered muskets or blunderbusses as well. Another man stood nearer the cave entrance, his poised appearance and almost officerlike garb distinguishing him from the rest. Clean-shaven, his black hair pulled into a pigtail under a colorfully plumed bicorn hat, he wore a single-breasted frock, waistcoat, breeches, and knee boots. Tucked into a leather bandolier across his chest were five flintlock pistols, three on his right hip, two on his left.
A sixth was in his hand and aimed at Morpaign.
“Damn my eyes,” Didier muttered. He pointed down at the murdered slave hands, his mouth agape. “Will you look at this?”
The man in the bicorn hat was silent, paying no attention to him, holding his weapon steady on Morpaign, keeping it level with his heart.
Morpaign lifted his gaze from its barrel to the gunman’s face.
“What have you done here?” he said, his lip quivering with shock and outrage.
A moment went by. The man creased his brow in mock confusion, as if only then becoming aware of the bodies.
“Ah, your chattel, forgive me,” he said in French.
“ ’Twas unfortunate they had to be put down, but I saw no surer way to prevent them from warning you of our arrival.” He shrugged. “My men were gentler with the sailors they took captive.”
It was Morpaign’s turn to stand without response, his eyes shifting back to the weapon that had been trained on him. He’d kept enough of his wits to notice the ornate cartouches on its gold-plated barrel . . . notice that and a good deal besides. At the extreme right corner of his vision, he could see the lute burning offshore, enveloped in fierce, ragged shrouds of flame, black blots of smoke swirling upward into the night from its lofty spars and crosstrees. A square-rigged brigantine with wide, sweeping sails sat in the water off to starboard, dark figures milling about its upper deck, cannons turned toward the beleaguered charter vessel.
Morpaign had instantly known there would be a Jolly Roger fluttering high atop the brig’s masthead, known it must have slipped into the bay to take the merchantman while it rested at anchor, coming up broadside with its batteries trained and ready . . .
“Permit me to introduce myself,” the gunman said, speaking English this time. Then he paused and seemed to catch his tongue: “Je suis désolé. Permettez-moi de me présenter—”
“I know who you are, pirate.” Morpaign glanced at the flames out in the cove, felt a different sort of angry combustion inside him. “Redbone Baxter’s notoriety precedes him.”
The man with the flintlock shrugged again.
“The names of pirates and gentlemen carry many leagues in the wind, Lord Morpaign,” he said. “In fact, I’ve grown to believe they travel furthest going in a shared direction . . . but only while the wind continues to blow strong.”
Morpaign had managed to regain some of his composure. “You spout nonsense and riddles,” he said.
“No.” Baxter shook his head. “I make you a proposal. A straightforward offer of partnership.”
Morpaign stood looking at him with disbelief. The man had attacked his charter, brought a raiding party ashore to plunder his shipment, executed his slaves without apparent qualm. How dare he speak now of partnership?
“If this is true,” he said, “it merely proves your madness.”
Again Baxter shook his head.
“Mine is no lunatic idea,” he said. “There are stirrings in North America that cannot be quieted by all the rivers of grog the colonists pour down their throats. In Charlestown, where your barrels were to be smuggled past harbor agents to avoid the threepence duties, the Tea Act puts new heat to tempers certain to boil over into rebellion. Whether this comes in months, a year, or two years, I cannot predict. But come it will. And whatever befalls afterward, I have no doubt that George the Third’s import taxes will be crammed up his royal arse, rendering extinct those who now profit from running contraband.” Baxter paused, showed a hint of a smile. “It would be wise of you to make the most of the present, m’lord . . . and wiser still to prepare for changes that are bound to occur in the future.”
Morpaign continued standing there in silence. He had been tempted to give vent to his fury, reject Baxter outright no matter the consequences—but something made him hesitate.
“Let us allow your remarks for a moment,” he said. “What have I to gain from linking myself to a bandit’s fortunes?”
Baxter returned his stare, his smile growing in size.
“It is through this bandit that you can expand your trade beyond measure,” he said. “I have picked my way along smuggling routes known only to a shrewd and adventurous handful, and made contacts who will be become indispensable when the black marketeer’s day is done in the Caribbean. The quantity of spiced rum you sell the northern colonists is but a fraction of what I can move. Double your production, triple it, you’ll gain buyers from Rhode Island to Georgia. And it needn’t end there. Give me raw cane by the cropload, hogsheads of molasses to fill a ship’s hold from top to bottom. I can guarantee their ready distribution.”
“And your share of the take?”
“An equal cut . . . no more, no less.” Baxter’s eyes gleamed. “You see, lord, I am ready to check
my natural greed for our common purpose.”
Morpaign had fallen still again, hands clenched into tight balls at his sides, beads of perspiration gathering in the furrow above his upper lip. His hatred of having to stand at another man’s mercy was almost choking in its intensity, matching only his disdain for the brigand’s swagger. And yet . . .
And yet despite all that, he could not have pretended to ignore the sharp bite of curiosity, and the tantalizing sense that it might be pursued to some unforeseen and illimitable gain. No, not even at point of gun, with the dead still pouring their blood into the ground under his feet.
“You fail to account for British maritime patrols,” he’d said in a deliberately hedging tone. “The cargo once aboard that merchantman is in your hands. Should you have found undeclared goods aboard, they would have been limited to inconspicuous quantities, stowed where they might have slipped past inspection. But a pirate vessel loaded with contraband . . . how could it elude the admiralty?”
Baxter laughed. It was a cold, somehow arrogant outburst that would echo in Morpaign’s thoughts very often in times to come, always inseparable from his recollection of molten red fireglow that had risen high into the black roof of the night.
“Now there’s the tickler,” he said. “I have become the admirality’s arm, lord. No longer pirate but privateer in its service. With the King’s colors flying from my masthead, and a letter of marque in my breast pocket, I am warranted to board vessels hostile to the empire and seize any illicit freight for a prize.” He grinned broadly, nodded in the direction of the torched vessel below. “Nothing could be safer from interdiction than a shipment carried under my banner.”
Morpaign looked at him for a long moment, opened his mouth to speak . . . and then shut it, his attention drawn by a sudden movement over to his right.
Didier, he realized. The impulsive, loose-lipped fool had turned from the bodies of the slaves, his face contorted with anger.
“That what cleared him to blow the brains out o’ our two best and strongest, seigneur?” he blurted, pointing at Baxter. “Or was his trigger finger actin’ on its own?”
Baxter’s grin pulled in at the edges but remained on his lips. He straightened, whirled on his heel, and swung his pistol toward the gesticulating overseer.
“Noise for noise,” he said.
His gun crashed and spouted flame. The horses tethered to the wagons reared up with fear, their tails flicking, front hooves kicking at the air. Morpaign heard Didier scream, saw him fall to the ground clutching his kneecap with both hands.
Baxter spared a moment to glance down at his whimpering victim, gave out an audible cluck of his tongue. Then he lowered the gun’s smoking barrel and turned back to Morpaign, his expression that of someone who had tolerated a fleeting, barely consequential interruption.
“Patch the sorry creature and he will survive—lame but better behaved,” he said. “Now I’d hear your response to my offer.”
Still struck with astonishment, Morpaign raised his eyes from where the overseer lay bleeding and crumpled near the murdered slaves.
“And if I decline?” he said, gathering himself together.
“I’d consider it a business decision and bear no grudge,” Baxter said. He nodded back toward the wagon, the flintlock resting against his hip. “That shipment of rum would adequately curb my disappointment as we part ways.”
The two men did not speak for a tense minute, the silence about them penetrated only by Didier’s sobs, the stamping and snorting of the horses, and the whispered exchanges of the stunned, frightened laborers inside the cave. They were peering out its mouth at the latest victim to fall before the gun, and Morpaign again found himself doing the same. Writhing in agony, his knee gushing, the overseer was a bad sight. If his wound was not tended soon, he would suffer the worst for his impulsive mouthings.
There was, however, a decision that needed to be reached first. His mind working, Morpaign gazed past Baxter at his ragtag band of sea rovers. Gathered around the wagon and its agitated team of horses, they returned his scrutiny with hard stares, the light of the flames over the water glinting off their blades.
Through me you can expand your trade beyond measure, Baxter had said. It was a bold declaration, yes. But could anything have made it easier to believe than the brazen ruthlessness of his actions?
Finally Morpaign returned his attention to Baxter, his bunched fists loosening at his sides.
Through wreck and violence, through blood and fire, his path had become clear. And more than that, or so it felt.
In the unreality of the moment, it all might have been a consecration of his destiny.
“Doing business with you,” he said with intent slowness, “shall be my pleasure.”
Redbone Baxter smiled. Then he holstered his flintlock, slipped another from his bandolier, and held it out by the long gold-plated barrel. Its elaborate scrollwork was similar to what Morpaign had seen on the first pistol, but here he also noticed a gleaming silver butt cap cast as a demonic face with narrow eyes, grotesquely distorted features . . . and, Morpaign thought, a grin of cold, insolent delight eerily similar to the one on Baxter’s face.
Or so it appeared to him, at least, in the tricky light and shadows hurled by the soaring, distant flames.
“Take the pistol as a gift, and consider it a symbol of our newborn alliance,” Baxter said. “May it endure for many long and profitable years.”
Morpaign nodded and accepted the gun.
“Long years, indeed,” he said, wrapping his fingers around its demon-headed stock.
ONE
VARIOUS LOCALES
APRIL 2006
MIAMI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, FLORIDA
“SEEMS TO ME YOU’VE PROBABLY GOT A COUPLE’a leakers,” said Hendricks, a big, burly, florid-cheeked guy in his middle fifties wearing a dark blue uniform with a U.S. Customs patch on the upper left breast of its shirt. He shook his clipboard at a skid truck parked on the nearby tarmac. “Better come see them for yourselves.”
Three of the four men standing in a semicircle around him seemed disinclined to budge an inch. They were also in uniform, albeit of a type that represented no government agency or legal authority. Still, their green jumpsuits, orange Day-Glo vests, yellow hard hats, and Sun West Air Transport employee ID tags did help get across the message implicit in their balky expressions—namely that this was not their specific responsibility, not by any interpretation of airline procedures, being they were only cargo handlers whose job pretty much began and ended with clearing out the DC-9’s transport hold, which was precisely what they and the rest of their crew had done minutes earlier. It was obvious they’d seen all they would have preferred of the questionable freight, and didn’t intend to see any more unless and until they were told to move it over to the terminal. Either that or they heard from their boss, Tom Bruford, the other man outside the jet representing Sun West, that they would need to put their aching arms and backs toward doing something else with it . . . though they hadn’t the foggiest idea what that something might be.
“A couple, well, I don’t know. It seems pretty unusual,” Bruford said now. An assistant transport manager with the freight forwarder, he was short, thin, tired-eyed, thirtyish, and in his blazer and tie, the only one in the group to be sporting ordinary business attire. “They’re stacked one on top of the other, right? I’m guessing it’s just spillage on that bottom crate.”
Hendricks gave him an irritated frown.
“I used the word ‘probably’ for a reason,” he said. “Do we really need to argue?”
“I wasn’t arguing.”
“Whatever you want to call it.”
“I’m just trying to explain something about the fish crates.” Bruford sighed. “They’re required to have Styrofoam liners, absorbent pads for drippage—”
Hendricks held up a hand to stop him.
“Before you raise more of a fuss,” he said, “you might want to remember the shipment’s got six cont
ainers in total listed on your manifest, and I’ve got them all sitting on that truck over there, and won’t have any choice except to reject the whole goddamn skid load for likely contamination if you won’t cooperate.”
Bruford opened his mouth to answer, decided he’d better snap it shut for his own good. In his sound and objective critical estimate, the inspector was a hump of the first order. Wait and see, in a minute he’d claim he had cut Sun West some kind of break by conducting his spot check out here on the runway instead of routinely waiting till the crates got inside the Customs building—which happened to be right next door to the freight forwarder’s international reception terminal, a hell of a lot more convenient location for everybody involved.
“Got to be spillage, but I’ll go have a look,” Bruford said, and turned toward the skid truck.
Hendricks tagged along with him.
“They’re pushed a little over to one side,” he said. “I had them separated from the rest, see?”
A Hump with a capital H, Bruford thought. “I can see that, right, thanks . . .”
Dropping back about a foot, Hendricks glanced at the documentation on his clipboard.
“Trinidad,” he read aloud in a sour tone. “I noticed that’s the shipment’s country of origin.”
“Right.”
“You ask me, whoever carries imports or exports from over there is only looking for trouble,” Hendricks said. “Its national health regs, oversight procedures, airport security . . . they’re all a joke.”
Crouched over the supposed leakers, Bruford was thinking he didn’t remember having asked the fat leprechaun for his opinion about that or anything else. In fact, he’d have gotten along just fine and zipa-dee-doo-dah dandy without it.
As he’d started telling Hendricks, the rugged three-hundred-pound-capacity wooden crates his men had offloaded onto the truck were a standardized type the Trinidadian client, an international seafood wholesaler, always used for moving large fish. Each ordinarily would have three sides pasted with the requisite stickers marking out its point of departure, weight in pounds and kilos, exact contents, and other important information. The contents code labels on these half dozen boxes in particular read “YN/THU-NALBA”—an abbreviation used industry-wide for yellowfin tuna, scientific name thunnus albacares.
