Crackdown

by Bernard Cornwell

  I thanked God they had not been waiting in ambush when Julie had dropped me at the gate, for God knows what slaughter they would have made had they fired at her van. But how had these men known where to find me? That was not a difficult question to answer, for I had spent all day telling people that I could be reached at the Maggot’s house, and doubtless my enemies had known ever since early morning that I was on the island. Who else could Bellybutton have telephoned? And who had he phoned? Billingsley? But if the policeman wanted me dead, why had he not killed me when I was in custody? Because too many questions would have been asked as a result of such a death. The conjectures flickered through my consciousness, even as I listened for a sound, any sound, that would betray the next move of my enemies.

  If they made any move at all, other than to escape, for they must have realised that their first attack had failed disastrously. If they had any sense they would cut and run now, just as I should cut and run before the police arrived. I expected the police at any moment, for surely someone must have heard the gunfire and called the authorities? I could smell blood. So much blood. Dog blood and man blood. The world stank of blood and burning kerosene; a mingling stench that even overpowered the reek from the channel behind me.

  I rolled over, expecting a shotgun blast.

  Nothing. The first man I had shot was out of my sight, blown back down the steps, but the second was still lying slumped at the foot of the wall. He was dressed in black fatigues. I edged across to him, skirting the paraffin flames, and took his Kalashnikov, which was the East German version with the pimply black plastic stock. The gun was sticky with the dead man’s blood, which I tried to wipe away. I took the two spare magazines that were jammed into a pouch attached to his webbing belt. The paraffin had set fire to the wicker mats that carpeted the verandah and the flames were suddenly brighter and fiercer.

  I changed the assault rifle’s magazine. That gave me thirty rounds. I was crouching low. Puddled in the dead man’s blood were some cartridges ejected from the Kalashnikov. They were made of green-lacquered steel like those I had found on Hirondelle so long ago. That coincidence did not mean that these men had also killed Hirondelle’s crew because the Eastern bloc, just like the West, was flooding the world with weapons. Talking peace is good for a politician’s image, but selling weapons is good for employment figures and foreign earnings. I was moving towards the side of the verandah which faced the car graveyard, towards the chain-link fence. No police had come yet.

  The heat of the burning wicker was increasing and its smoke was thickening, but that smoke was not going to help me because it was rising into the air instead of clinging to the ground like a screen. The burning wicker would drive me off the verandah, but only into the aim of the surviving gunmen. To burn or be shot? I was as indecisive as Hamlet. Be shot, I decided, and so I stood up, keeping my back against the wall of Maggot’s house and pushed the Webley into my trouser pocket. Nothing moved in the yard of scrapped cars. I could just see the far-off open sea above the piles of shimmering crushed metal. My back hurt where the pellets had hit me on board Wavebreaker; those shotgun pellets had all been removed and the wounds were almost healed, yet suddenly they felt raw and painful.

  I cocked the Kalashnikov. I used to teach marines how to strip and fire a Kalashnikov, the theory being that one day they might have to fight with captured weapons. The Kalashnikov was a good gun. You could stamp on it, burn it, drown it, and still it goes on working. I edged down the stairs, expecting the blast of a shotgun at any second. The stench of dog blood was thick, and the buzz of flies even thicker. Sweat trickled down my face and stung my eyes. I cuffed it away. No one fired. I reached the ground and ran like a hare to the sewage outfall wall where Bronco-Buster was moored. The wall’s top was curved, like an arch over a pipe, and the concrete was crumbling. The stink of sewage and oil and smoke and blood was overpowering. I stumbled desperately off the wall’s curvature to land heavily on Bronco-Buster’s aft deck. She was thirty-two feet long, had a flying bridge and a tattered fighting chair that did not look strong enough to withstand the tug of a stickleback. I crouched in her open wheelhouse, watching the shore.

  Fire and smoke still showed on the verandah, but much more feebly now, for the wicker mats had burned out and the rest of the structure was built of timbers so massive that it would need a blowtorch to set them on fire. The charred remnants of the canvas awning, blown ragged by the grenade, lifted in the warm and idle wind. I doubted that the flames would spread to the Maggot’s house, for the old cold-store was built of materials that would not ignite easily.

  Still no police had come. Nothing living moved except three turkey vultures that circled overhead. I was slowly concluding that I was safe, that no gunmen were left to fire at me, but that did not mean I could relax. The police must surely come, and to avoid their questions I decided to take Bronco-Buster to sea, though that notion depended on the boat’s engine starting. I decided I would run for Straker’s Cay. I could think of nowhere else to go. It was not safe to stay here, for my enemies would be sure to return, and if not my enemies than it would be the police. All that was left was to salvage Masquerade and go. There was nothing else. No Ellen.

  I thought I heard a car accelerate away, but was not certain. I waited ten more minutes, then straightened up in the wheelhouse. No one fired at me. Bronco-Buster’s engine and fuel tanks were all under padlocked hatches and her ignition needed a key, which meant I would have to hot-wire the boat, but first I had to make sure she was fuelled. I used the Kalashnikov’s flash suppressor as a jemmy, ripping a hasp and padlock out of the spongy wood to lift a locker lid and reveal the boat’s main fuel tank.

  She was almost empty. A sight glass ran down beside the big fifty-gallon fuel tank, and it showed hardly a quarter inch of fuel remaining. That was just enough to reach McIllvanney’s yard where I would beg, borrow or steal Starkisser.

  I began levering at the engine hatch, needing to turn on the seacocks that fed the motor’s cooling system, when I heard the creak of the Maggot’s gate. I looked up.

  The Maggot had come home at last. I felt an avalanche of relief crash through me as I watched him climb out of his red Firebird to open the gates, then I shouted to warn him that gunmen might still be lurking in ambush, but he was too far away to hear me over the sound of his car’s engine so I fired the Kalashnikov into the air, and that alerted him. He dived back into the Firebird and I saw him leaning towards the glove compartment, presumably to find a gun.

  I clambered off the boat on to the awkward slope of the wall. The Maggot accelerated into his yard, his tyres spinning a smokescreen of dust into the humid air. No one fired at him. He skidded the car to a stop beside the body of his dead Rottweiler. Flies buzzed. The Maggot did not spare the dog a glance, but just ran up the verandah steps with a fire extinguisher he had snatched from his car. “What the hell happened?” he shouted at me.

  “Where the hell’s Ellen?” I shouted back. Fire hissed as the Maggot released the chemical extinguisher. A noxious mist, foul as the stench of the creek, reeked away from the verandah. “Where’s Ellen?” I shouted again as I reached the foot of the verandah steps.

  “Ellen?” The Maggot turned and frowned at me as though he did not really understand the basis of my question. “She’s with you, isn’t she? That’s where she said she was going!”

  And with those words all hope went.

  “We went to her apartment, OK? She fetched her things, went on to the Literacy Project, then she reckoned that she didn’t want to sail that heap of junk to the Keys, but wanted to go back to you, so I dropped her off at the ferry terminal.”

  “You just left her there?”

  “Sure! She insisted she was OK.” The Maggot, kicking the last sparks of the fire dead, sensed my unspoken criticism that he should have been more protective, and that he should even have flown Ellen back to Straker’s Cay. “I had a booking to fly three Venezuelans to Rodentworld.” Rodentworld was the Maggot’s nickname for Disney-
world; so called because it was the place where people dressed as mice to welcome the tourists. “The charter had been booked for weeks, Nick,” he went on defensively, “and I couldn’t let them down.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” It was unfair to blame the Maggot for what had happened. He had done his best.

  “And frankly—” he forced a very unconvincing laugh, “Ellen wasn’t really happy in my company. You know how she reacts to me? Like I was something thrown up by a hog?”

  He backed down off the verandah that was still wreathed in smoke and fumes, though the last of the flames had been extinguished.

  “Ellen never arrived at Straker’s Cay,” I told the Maggot, but then a sudden and searing pulse of hope shot through me. “Unless she’s there now? Maybe she arrived after I left?”

  The Maggot shook his head. “I’ve just come from there. I went looking for you.” He had gone to the body of the gunman who had fallen backwards down the stairs and now he crouched beside the bloody corpse to search its pockets. This dead gunman, like the other, was dressed in the quasi-military black fatigues.

  “You went looking for me?” I asked the Maggot.

  “That senator—Crowninshield—wants to see you,” the Maggot explained carelessly, as though US senators were always demanding my company, then he suddenly cursed and twitched back from the dead body as though it had bitten him.

  “What?”

  “Jesus!” The Maggot tossed me the wallet he had taken from a pocket of the fatigues. Till now the Maggot had displayed a remarkable insouciance in the face of the flames and death that had polluted his house, but now he was suddenly showing real alarm.

  The wallet was stuffed with money, but it was not the cash that had alarmed the Maggot. It was the warrant card. The dead man with the flies in his mouth was a policeman. I had just shot a policeman. I had probably just shot two policemen.

  “Oh, my God.” I was shaking.

  The Maggot stood up. His red Firebird made a ticking noise as its engine cooled, but otherwise there was silence. The other gunman or gunmen had fled. The gate of the warehouse yard was open and tyre tracks showed on the road where they had spun their wheels in their hurry to get away. They had left their dead behind. Dead policemen. The Maggot stepped backwards. He was going to abandon me, I was sure of it and I could not blame him.

  “Deacon Billingsley,” the Maggot suddenly said.

  “That’s not Billingsley,” I said. I was still shaking. It was slowly dawning on me just how much trouble I was in. The world had jumped its gears. Just a month ago I had been helping to film a Pussy-Cute commercial, and my biggest worry had been keeping the bloody cats from marooning themselves up Wavebreaker’s rigging; now I was a cop-killer and that meant an eternity in jail, or even worse. “Do they have capital punishment in the Bahamas?”

  “Billingsley must have sent them.” The Maggot had taken the wallet back from me and was pulling out the wads of money. “For God’s sake, Nick, think! You were a witness to Thessy’s murder. They want to get rid of all the witnesses.”

  I stared at the gunman. Flies were thick on the awful throat wound. “They weren’t here on police business?” I asked, still in shock.

  “Of course they were not damn well here on police business.” The Maggot had grabbed the corpse by its boots and was dragging it under the smoking verandah where it would be hidden from the road. “Even the Bahamian Police are not yet officially drug-smugglers. And for God’s sake, don’t just stand there! Help me get the hell out of here!”

  “Help?” It was dawning on me that the Maggot was not going to leave me to my grim fate, but was planning on helping me. I felt a flood of gratitude for the huge man.

  “Sooner or later their pals will come looking.” The Maggot found his keys and unlocked the door. “So for Christ’s sake, let’s go!”

  He began hauling green canvas bags from inside his house and told me to stack them into the boot of his car. The bags were heavy and clanked metallically, as though they were filled with golf clubs, then I realised the Maggot was rescuing the best of his astonishing gun collection. “Are you abandoning this place?” I asked him.

  He paused for a second. “Two dead policemen in my house? You bet I’m getting the hell out of here.” He tossed out two plastic garbage bags of clothes, a briefcase, then a silver-framed photograph that showed a delicately beautiful brunette dressed in a body-stocking and leg warmers. He had plainly been prepared to make a moonlight flight, knowing just which possessions he wanted to rescue and which he wanted to abandon. Then, leaving the house door open, he shouted at me to get in the car.

  I still held the photograph. The engine snapped into life, the back wheels spewed dirt and dust as the Maggot let out the clutch, then we were fishtailing out of his compound and on to the road. He accelerated away.

  I looked at the portrait. The girl had a fragile loveliness, raven-dark hair, bright eyes, and an impudently cheerful smile. Her body was lithe and taut. “Pittsburgh?” I asked the Maggot.

  “Yeah.” He spun the wheel hard and I heard the guns shift in the boot.

  “She’s very beautiful,” I said in real tribute.

  “Yeah. Except now she’s giving blow jobs in the back room of a peep-show.” The Maggot’s voice was grim as death. “That picture was taken before she found cocaine. They don’t look so damn good afterwards.”

  God damn it. I closed my eyes as though I could obliterate the misery in darkness. Ellen. The thought of her suddenly swamped me, making me want to cry. She had tried to catch a ferry to come back to me, and it was from the ferry that Jackson Chatterton had been pushed to his death. It had all gone wrong.

  And now we were running.

  We loaded everything into the Maggot’s Beechcraft. That, at least, he could take with him when he left the Grand Bahamas, though he was resigned to losing the car. He was fond of his Firebird. It had a bumper sticker which read ‘This Might Not Be The Mayflower, But Your Daughter Came Across In It.’ The Maggot tried to peel the bumper sticker away, claiming he might never find another like it, but the paper tore in his big fingers.

  “For Christ’s sake!” I snapped. “Let’s get out of here!”

  “I’ve got to file a flight plan yet. You wait.” He at last abandoned the bumper sticker and, snatching up a chart and a pile of papers, strode away towards the airport buildings.

  I climbed into the Beechcraft. It was like a Turkish bath inside the plane, which was standing in the full sunlight, but at least I had the illusion of being hidden. I was nevertheless scared, expecting to hear the visceral wail of a police siren at any second. I watched a helicopter come beating in from the north, its rotors flashing light, and I was sure that it was bringing men to arrest me. I slunk down in my seat as the machine landed not far from the Maggot’s plane. I waited for the helicopter to disgorge uniformed men, but instead a hugely fat man in Bermuda shorts climbed out of the helicopter and, without a glance in my direction, walked away.

  The Maggot seemed to have disappeared. Sweat was pouring off me. By now, I thought, the police would have found the bodies of their two colleagues. They must have found the bodies. The men who had fled the scene must surely have reported the killings and my description was doubtless already clattering out of telex machines in dozens of police stations across the islands. It was such an easy description: just look for Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. “Shit, shit, shit!” I swore aloud, pounding the plane’s broken dashboard, willing the Maggot to reappear from the control tower. He still did not come.

  Two black men in white overalls strolled towards the Firebird. They stood admiring the car’s lines. The overalls were too clean, I decided. Each man wore the logo of an oil company, but I was sure they were policemen. One of the men lit a cigarette. Where the hell was the Maggot? I shrank down in the seat.

  Ellen was gone. I had lost Masquerade. All I could now hope for was to get out of the islands alive, and then to run from the extradition lawyers. It was my own fault. Ellen had warned me
not to get involved with the drug lords; she had warned me on the morning I had found the floating wreckage of the Hirondelle, but I had not listened to her, and now she, like Thessy and Jackson Chatterton, was dead. Or probably dead. Or worse. I shivered suddenly, not with cold, but with horror. I knew my grief was in a kind of suspense and that when it came it would be hard to bear, but not so hard as the ordeal that Ellen must already have endured.

  The two white-overalled men strolled away. I could hear them laughing. A big passenger jet thumped down on to the main runway. Its engines went into reverse thrust and the thunder bellowed across the field. Where the hell was the Maggot? “Jesus!” I swore impotently. “Come on! Come on!”

  Then a police car drove into a car park just a hundred yards away and a uniformed constable climbed out. He stared directly at me, then, as though drawing out my torture, he yawned and stretched his cramped arms. I was tempted to run. Not only would I be charged with murder, but probably with gun-smuggling as well, for the Beechcraft was crammed with weapons. One of the guns, astonishingly, was a Kalashnikov PKM, the general-purpose Russian machine-gun, which the Maggot claimed to have bought off a collector in Florida. The Beechcraft even had boxes of ammunition for the Russian gun, each box containing belts of one hundred rounds. The rope-handled boxes, I noticed, were all labelled Oficina Economica Cubana. Another bag held a clutch of little Czechoslovakian Scorpion sub-machine-guns, toylike weapons that were lethal at close quarters. What kind of a mind, I wondered, thought it important to salvage such things when doing a moonlight flit? And what kind of a man would strand me in his plane for so long? “Come on!” I encouraged the invisible Maggot.

  The policeman turned and strolled towards the airport terminal. Dust blew across the tarmac. Ellen, Ellen, Ellen. The reality of her fate had not sunk in yet, or else the horror of what had happened to her was so great that my mind refused to face it. Sweetman had surely had her killed, or kidnapped. I tried to think of something I could do to find her, or to avenge her, but there was nothing. I was utterly helpless for I did not know where Jesse Sweetman was, and even if I did know I was not sure what I could do, and then I suddenly wondered just why the Maggot had been so certain that Deacon Billingsley had sent the policemen to kill me at his house. I had never learned of any connection between Sweetman and Billingsley, so why had the Maggot assumed there was?