“Which is why we wanted your help,” the senator said, “to navigate for us? And of course we would appreciate your advice.” Using one of Coffinhead’s inflatable boats made good sense.
Coffinhead used the boats to carry diving parties to the coral reefs, but they were not much different from the rigid-raider assault boats I had used in the Marines. The big boats were fast, but best of all their rubberised gunwales gave very little purchase to a radar impulse, and that could be important for Murder Cay was equipped with radar. I sorted through the DEA’s colour surveillance photographs until I found the picture which showed the radar aerial mounted on the tower of the biggest house. I was trying to tell from the size of the aerial just how sensitive the island’s radar would be.
The senator divined my worry. He had another identical blue file at his elbow, and now he opened it and leafed through the papers inside. “We’ve registered that radar’s electronic signature, Nick, and we know that it operates at ten thousand megahertz on a three-centimetre wavelength with a zero point five microsecond pulse length.”
“Oh, thank God for that,” the Maggot said with heavy sarcasm, “I thought it might be a problem.”
“What he means,” I explained, “is that it’s a recreational radar, like the kind you see on weekend powerboats, but it’s still dangerous.”
“But the inflatable boat—” the senator began.
“Will probably slip under that radar without being noticed,” I confirmed for him. Inflatables, with their curved hull shape and low freeboard, were notoriously hard to detect on radar. “But vanishing from the radar doesn’t mean that you’ll reach the island. It’s going to be dark tonight! There’s not much moon. How the hell do you think you’re going to see the channel?”
“With these.” The Maggot smiled and held up a pair of passive night-goggles.
“I think we’ve anticipated most of the problems,” the senator said modestly. He paused then, hoping to hear my assent, for I had still not told either man that I would travel to Murder Cay that night. I kept silent and the senator translated that silence as a reluctance to help him, so he took out the big photograph which showed the whole of the island and used it to demonstrate the foolproof nature of his plan. “We thought we’d land there”—he pointed to a small beach which lay close to the radio aerial and very near to the entrance channel—”and we hoped that you would stay with the boat, Nick, while we cross the golf course in an attempt to find Rickie and Robin-Anne.” He hesitated, then offered me an oddly strained smile, “And you can be sure that we’ll seek news of Ellen as well, and if we discover that she’s being held against her will then we’ll call for help. No one can hold an American citizen prisoner without due process.”
“Hold on!” I said. I had not told the senator anything at all about Ellen’s disappearance. “How did you know she’s missing?” I asked him, and could not hide the tone of accusation.
“Because I told him,” the Maggot admitted cheerfully. “I telephoned from the control tower before we left Freeport!”
“Of course.” I felt very foolish.
“Nick?” The senator’s voice was very tentative, and I sensed he was about to offer me sympathy. “I didn’t know,” he said, “that you and Ellen were—”
“It’s OK, senator,” I said, interrupting him. I know he meant well, but I did not think I could cope with his heavy-handed sympathy.
There was an awkward pause. A sea-breeze blew through the unglazed window, beyond which pelicans perched on the pilings that held Coffinhead’s boat slips where his small fleet rocked gently under the palm trees. I thought how happy a man could be in a place like this, yet every Eden had its serpent, and the serpent in the Bahamian Eden was the proximity of America’s hunger for drugs.
“Our biggest problem”—the senator tried to restore our attention to his plans for the night—”will be the guards. Warren Smedley of the DEA tells me that he’s certain there will be guards, because it’s likely that there’s several million dollars’ worth of cocaine stored on the island. The guards are probably based in the Colon house, that’s the one with the radar.” The senator leafed through the photographs I had brought from the Maggot’s plane and showed us the house with the small tower.
“I am hopeful,” the senator went on, “that the guards won’t even be aware of our presence. I am also hopeful that we know in which house the twins are staying. I suspect it’s the northernmost house. One of my aides spotted a cassette tape which he recognised as one of Rickie’s favourites. It’s an English group. Something about a dirt-box. Here, you can see the tape box if you look closely.” He found a picture of the northernmost house and laid it on the table. “There.” He pointed at a lounger on the terrace. “If you’ve got good eyes you can probably see it without a magnifying glass.”
Then I stopped listening to the senator and looking for the wretched Pinkoe Dirt-Box Band cassette, because I had seen something else in the photograph. It was something I had missed when I had cursorily leafed through the prints in the aeroplane.
I had found a boat.
Not Dream Baby, but another boat.
The northernmost house, like all the others on Murder Cay, had a private dock that projected into the lagoon. The water at the dock was clearly not deep enough for the larger boats like Dream Baby, but shallow-draught craft could safely be moored to the pilings, and the camera had caught one such boat moored at the northern pier. The angle of the sun and the coincidence of a tangle of palm shadows half obscured the boat, which is why I had missed it on my first casual glance, but now I saw the fantastic flourish that had been painted on the boat’s long bows. That flourish was a shooting star embellished with a cupid’s pair of lips. Starkisser. My blood was suddenly running ice cold. The photograph might mean nothing, yet somehow it meant everything. Starkisser had been at Murder Cay on the very day after Ellen had disappeared, and why, earlier this day, had Bellybutton run from me in such abject terror? Did Bellybutton know that McIllvanney had delivered Ellen to Murder Cay, and was that why he had fled from my anger?
“Nick?” The senator, who had been talking, had evidently asked me a question which had blown straight past me.
I looked up at him. “I’m sorry?”
“I just wondered what chance of success you give us tonight?”
“Success?” I had to laugh. “None at all, senator. Your aides are right, and you’re not just committing political suicide, but real suicide! Your idea doesn’t have a prayer. It doesn’t stand a cat’s chance! You’ve fallen out of your tree, the pair of you. Those bastards on Murder Cay are going to chew you up and spit you out, both of you.”
The Maggot showed no reaction to my pessimism, but the senator looked appalled. “Does that mean you won’t help us, Nick?” For answer I yanked the Russian PKM machine-gun free of the other weapons, unfolded its butt, dropped its bipod, crashed its feed mechanism open and shut, then cocked it. It had been years since I had trained on this particular model, but the familiarity flooded back instantly, and the harsh sounds of the gun’s oiled movements echoed sharply and efficiently in the small room. I pulled the trigger to let the bolt fall on the empty chamber, then I slammed the gun down on the table. I had been showing off; demonstrating my slick competence with guns and letting the senator know that I had been a Marine, and a good one, and that he needed me. “Of course I’m coming,” I said. “I want to kick some ass.”
The senator’s smile of relief was very flattering. He held out his hand. “Thank you, Nick.”
“Way to go!” the Maggot said, and gave me a high five. My father, in one of his rare moments of giving me sober advice, had once warned me against an excessive dependency on emotions. Such a dependency, he claimed, was a luxury only to be indulged in by inadequate actors, children, and clergymen. The rest of us had a duty to think before we jumped and to consider the consequences of our actions. I do not think Sir Tom believed a word of what he was saying—he was probably rehearsing some thoughts from a play h
e was reading at the time—but, despite the hypocrisy of its histrionic delivery, I had always remembered the advice. I had rarely acted on it, but I had remembered it. Now, staring at the photograph which linked Matthew McIllvanney with Murder Cay, I forgot that good advice. I forgot it because I knew McIllvanney had been stalking Ellen, and suddenly it was all so patently obvious. McIllvanney had kidnapped Ellen and taken her to Murder Cay, there to give her to our enemies, so all I now wanted to do was to take the vicious Russian gun and use it to cry havoc to an island. I did not care what chaos I engendered, I just wanted to hurt the men who had hurt Ellen.
But I should have remembered my father’s hypocritical advice. The senator must have known that three men were not sufficient to challenge the malevolence of the narcotraficantes. Yet the senator was going to Murder Cay.
I should have known that the senator would not lightly put at risk his glorious political future. Yet the senator was going to Murder Cay.
And what part was the Drug Enforcement Administration playing? I did not ask myself that question, yet I knew they had provided the surveillance photographs, and it now seemed they had even read the signature of the radar set on Murder Cay. So what else had they done?
And the Maggot, for all his crudities, had an appetite to enjoy life, yet he too was going to Murder Cay. And where did the Scorpion guns come from, or the PKM, or the flak-jackets? Or the passive night-goggles?
I asked myself none of those questions. Instead I told myself that I was couching a lance for Ellen, just as the senator was charging home for his children, and just as the Maggot was revenging a once dazzling girl who now danced empty-eyed in a Pittsburgh peep-show.
Thus fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
The little Scorpions came with either a ten- or twenty-round magazine, and I helped myself to six of the bigger ones which I taped in pairs, back to back, so that when one magazine was exhausted I would only have to reverse a taped pair to have the gun ready to fire again. I also took handfuls of Coffinhead’s smoke-flares which, while not as good as smoke-grenades, could still generate a useful screen.
The senator refused to carry any weapon, saying he could not provoke violence, while the Maggot loyally chose the American M16 and two American-made Ingram sub-machine-guns. The Maggot and I carried all the guns down to Coffinhead’s dock and stowed them in one of the rigid-raiders. Coffinhead himself was filling the gas tank. He cocked a curious eye at the guns, but knew better than to ask any questions. Instead he wanted to know when the senator was paying him.
“Before we leave tonight,” the Maggot promised, and I wondered just how much this night’s escapade was costing the senator. Certainly Coffinhead was making a fat profit, not just on renting the boat, but he was also charging the senator for the tarpaulin that hid the guns, for the compass I would use to navigate the last few miles to the island, and for the bag of emergency smoke-flares that I had stored under the tarpaulin in the inflatable’s rigid-bottomed hull.
Once the boat was loaded, the Maggot and I wandered to the end of the dock. The light was shading into evening as we stared through the narrow channel that led from Coffinhead’s marina to the open sea. The water was being glossed gold by the setting sun and it was hard to believe that the coming night could bring gunfire.
The Maggot lit a cigarette, then offered me a wry look. “You must be tired, Nick.”
“A bit.” In truth I was utterly knackered.
“I’m glad you’re coming, though.” He spoke softly.
“I’m only doing it for Ellen,” I said bitterly. “Nothing else.”
“Sure, Nick. That’s what I reckoned.” He drew deep on the cigarette, then blew a stream of smoke towards the water.
“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why you’re doing it. You don’t like the senator, and you’d hate his son.”
“I’m doing it for the same reason you’re doing it,” the Maggot said, then he paused and I thought he was not going to elaborate, but suddenly he shrugged. “I was married to Pittsburgh.” He made the confession abruptly.
“Oh, God.” I was suddenly overwhelmed by the sadness of it all. We have just one life to live, only one, and so many people seem to piss the gift away. I thought of the girl’s vivacity, and I tried to imagine such a beauty being wasted in a sleazy stinking pit of a peep-show.
“I guess I’m still married to her,” the Maggot continued quietly. It was hard to read his facial expression behind the tangle of beard, but his voice was full of a most bitter grief. “Her name is Wendy,” he went on, and I sensed that he had not talked about his wife for many years. “Wendy Maggovertski. I met her in a hotel in Cleveland. We’d gone there to play the Browns, and she told me we were going to get our hides whipped. We did too, and she married me ten days later. Just like that. I thought the sun and stars shone out of that lady, Nick.”
I stared at him, wishing that Ellen had seen this vulnerable side of such an apparently invulnerable man. “I’m sorry, John,” I said inadequately.
“She could make people laugh, know what I mean?” He stared blindly across the lovely stretch of water. “When she walked into a room it was like an extra bulb had been switched on. Now she gives blow jobs to buy herself cocaine.”
“Oh, God,” I said, so very inadequately.
“It was a fag dancer who trained at her health club who gave her the first cocaine. He gave me some too. I thought it was just another piece of being alive, a piece of fun, but it never touched me like it touched Wendy. She suddenly wanted nothing but cocaine, then more cocaine, and when I stopped giving her the money for it she left me to make her own money.” He sucked on the cigarette again, so deeply that its tip glowed a hard, brilliant red. “I killed the little bastard.”
“Who?”
“The fag dancer.” There were tears in the Maggot’s eyes. “No one knows, of course, and I’d deny it if you told anyone, but I broke the pansy faggot’s neck.” The spleen in the Maggot’s voice was of a terrible intensity. “It didn’t help. It didn’t bring Wendy back. She’ll never come back now. She’ll just die. But tonight I’ll take some more revenge on the bastards who took her away from me. Fuck ‘em, Nick! Let’s go get ‘em!” He howled the challenge into the darkling lagoon, then thumped one huge fist into a massive palm, and I thought this was how he must have been just before a football game, hyped up and emotional, except that tonight we were playing with guns, and any defeat would be for ever.
Because tonight we would both be fools for love.
At Murder Cay.
PART FOUR
The passive night-goggles turned the world into a dreamy green place of smeared liquid-light. I had donned the goggles as we neared Murder Cay, thus turning the silver and black into jade and lime. I was aiming the inflatable towards the island’s radio mast that speared like a dark green line drawn against the paler green of the sky in which the stars showed as bright emerald sparks. The Devil’s Necklace, which lay like an outer defence about Murder Cay, was betrayed in the goggles by the brightness of the water breaking on the coral heads, while the crooked passage through the reefs was revealed as a smoothly shining green-black path which led to the black, unlit bulk of the island itself.
Nothing moved on the island and no light showed there. If any light had been burning it would have sparked brilliant and cruel in the night-goggles’ screen, but the navigation light on the island’s southern tip, like the red air-warning beacons on its tall radio mast and the green and white airstrip beacon, was switched off.
I put the engine into neutral and let the boat drift a half-mile outside the reefs while I searched for any signs that our arrival had been detected, but no boats patrolled the lagoon and no jeeps moved on the single road. “What’s happening?” the senator asked nervously.
“Just checking,” I said.
“Is it OK?” The senator was more than nervous. He was scared. He fidgeted with the short rubber-sheathed aerial of the battery-powered VHF radio that he carried in a pou
ch of his bullet-proof vest. The senator had insisted on bringing two such hand-held radios, just in case everything went wrong and we needed to scream to the outside world for help.
“Playtime, children,” the Maggot said with grim facetiousness and in an effort to spur me onwards, but still I let the boat drift on the rising tide. I was giving my instincts time to smell the night’s danger.
It was dark. The moon was a sickle blade low in the south-eastern sky, though in my goggles it looked more like a freshly cut paring of the purest green light. We were in the small hours of Friday morning, the witching hours when the mind is at its most superstitious and fearful, yet so far everything had gone astonishingly smoothly. Coffinhead Porter had slung the loaded rigid-raider from a pair of davits at the stern of his big sports-fishing boat, then had ripped us across a jet-black sea to drop us thirty miles from Murder Cay.
Now, forty minutes later, we drifted a half-mile from the Devil’s Necklace and I stared entranced at an emerald world. “Nick?” The senator, like the Maggot, had no night-goggles, and could see nothing in the darkness.
“It’s OK,” I said at last, then I let in the engine’s clutch so that the big inflatable moved smoothly forward. The Maggot, crouching in the bows, slid the Russian-made machine-gun over the gunwale. On the goggles’ screen the gun’s belt of ammunition looked like linked green bars of glowing gold.
The water crashed and broke and seethed on the coral. I thought how the island’s small radar set must pick up a lot of wave clutter from the coral heads, and how that clutter would hide us; then we were in the channel, moving slowly and almost silently. The channel was supposed to be bare of navigation marks, but I spotted a small buoy, nothing but a plastic bottle on a weighted line, which marked the dog-leg bend, then we were past the buoy and I turned the boat and accelerated slightly as a faint line of paler green showed me where the pebble beach lay at the foot of the radio mast.
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