Crackdown

by Bernard Cornwell

  The security lights on the island’s houses were suddenly switched on.

  The Maggot cursed, while I snatched off the goggles which had suddenly flared blindingly bright. The world reverted to a prosaic darkness slashed by the sudden line of arc-lights which stretched across the island to silhouette the trees and shrubs growing between the houses and the slender golf course. I had instinctively throttled the motor back as the lights came on so that we were scarcely moving as we cleared the landward end of the passage and started across the smooth black water that lay within the protective ring of coral. The lights were reflected on the blackness in long sinuously shivering streams of silver.

  The senator was sitting straight up, staring with alarm at the brightly lit island, but, despite the security lights, nothing moved there and no guards were visible. I wondered if the lights were randomly switched on and off automatically. “Do you want to abort?” I asked the senator.

  “I think perhaps we should.” Crowninshield was in a plain funk. He was not trained to such escapades, and he had not imagined that the night would be like this. Doubtless he had hoped for a straightforward landing, a fortuitous meeting with his children, and a decorous withdrawal. Instead every moment increased the tension.

  “We don’t abort!” the Maggot said. “We go on.”

  “Maybe we’d better go on,” the senator said, and I wondered if he always agreed with the last man to express a firm opinion, and I recalled the jibe that he was a politician without a cause. Or was he about to make the war on drugs the cause that would propel him to glory?

  Then the island’s lights went out.

  “Someone there is awake,” I forgot my doubts about the senator’s motives, suggesting instead an explanation for the dousing of the security lamps, “but they’re not suspicious. They probably have orders to switch the lights on for a few minutes every hour, but now that they’ve seen nothing they’ll be going back to watching their dirty video.” I hoped the video was very dirty indeed, dirty enough to keep the guards’ eyes riveted on the screen as we negotiated the entrance channel. I pulled the night-goggles back over my eyes again. A bright strip of emerald light glowed in the tower of the house where the guards were posted. That strip of light had not been there a moment before, and I guessed that it marked where the guard had left the shutters or curtains cracked open after he had peered into the glow of the security lights. I looked northwards, to my right, and saw that the northernmost house, the one I was convinced was Sweetman’s, lay in utter darkness.

  “Let’s go, Nick!” The senator was being tormented by the boat’s sluggish speed.

  I eased the throttle forward. The Maggot had discarded the machine-gun and picked up his rifle and I heard the clatter of its bolt as he worked a round into the chamber.

  “Put the gun on safe!” I said warningly. I did not want an accidental shot disturbing our enemies.

  “You put a hole in both ends of the egg, then suck? Is that right, Nick?” The Maggot grinned at me. His face, like the senator’s and mine, had been smeared raggedly black with a foul-smelling camouflage cream that was supposed to double as an insect repellent. We were all wearing flak-jackets over camouflage shirts and trousers. I superstitiously wished I had my old beret.

  It seemed unreal to be back in a rigid-raider. Sometimes, in the Marines, we had been encouraged to make a silent, creeping approach, while at other times we would simply point the rubber boats towards the enemy shore and let the things tear the sea into white shreds. This night’s adventure still seemed like one of those long-ago training exercises, an illusion helped by the smell of the gun oil and the rank camouflage cream. I aimed the inflatable straight for the base of the towering radio mast, then we all lurched forward as the rigid hull of the inflatable struck a rock or shoal. I twisted the wheel and gunned the throttle so that the boat slithered and scraped over the obstacle into deeper water.

  “Get ready!” I called softly.

  We were travelling faster now, and showing a white wake at our stern. I wanted to drive the boat’s bows well up the beach. I snatched off the goggles at the last moment, then cut the engine as the small wave that was pushed ahead of our bows broke white and loud on the shelving pebbles. “Hold tight!”

  We struck the beach. There was another and fiercer lurch, a scraping noise that seemed hugely loud in the dark night, then we shuddered to a halt. The sound of the boat’s rigid fibreglass baseplate sliding on loose stone echoed in my ears. “Go! Go!” I hissed the command.

  The Maggot led the way. His feet crunched briefly on stone, then he was running awkwardly towards the black shadow of the radio mast’s enormous concrete foundation. He was carrying the rifle and two sub-machine-guns that seemed tiny in his huge hands. He was also lugging a kit bag which held extra ammunition and a supply of smoke-flares. I heard the thump as he dropped the bag in the shadow of the concrete. “Ready!” he called softly.

  “Go, senator,” I ordered. “Good luck.”

  The senator stepped rather fastidiously out of the boat, then clambered up the shallow lip of limestone and turf that edged the small beach. There was just enough moonlight to show the soft swells of the nearest fairway on the golf course. A wind stirred one of the flags marking a green.

  I lugged the machine-gun and as much ammunition as I could carry on to dry land. I made the boat fast, then picked up the Kalashnikov and two boxes of its ammunition. The Maggot and the senator were already crossing the golf course, going to find the twins. Somehow, in this darkness, that seemed a rather forlorn mission.

  It also seemed much warmer on land, and I was sweating beneath my heavy bullet-proof vest. I mounted the gun at the corner of the radio mast’s foundation, which was a concrete block four feet high and ten feet square. The huge lump gave me almost perfect protection from any gunfire that might come from the houses beyond the fairway. I lay down behind the gun, opened its feed tray and pushed in a new belt of ammunition, then cocked the mechanism. I raised the rear sight and aimed the gun towards the streak of light in the tower. I suddenly felt ridiculous; I was blacked up and armed, like an actor playing at war. I also felt dog tired. It seemed impossible that just twenty-four hours ago I had been on a ferry, and since then I had searched Grand Bahamas for Ellen, fought off an attempt on my life, then agreed to this nighttime madness.

  I yawned. For two pins I would have rested my head on the Kalashnikov’s butt and closed my eyes. The night insects were loud among the sea-grape that grew to the north, and the foam was incessant where it broke loud on the coral behind me, but otherwise the only sound to disturb the night was the muffled grumble of the island’s generator. The senator and the Maggot were lost in the darkness, and again it struck me as perversely odd that the two should have made their unlikely alliance. How had the senator known that the big bearded man had such a fierce hatred of drugs? That question startled me into full wakefulness. And why was the Maggot equipped with ammunition from Cuba? Had it been part of the vast cache captured by the American forces on Grenada? Or had it come from the Panamanian arsenals captured when Noriega was arrested? But if so, why was it in the Maggot’s hands? I began to realise that there were some very good questions that I should have been asking hours ago. Perhaps the most important question was why a man like Crowninshield would risk this adventure and thus hazard his tenancy of the White House. For his children? Would Crowninshield really sacrifice the White House for Rickie? My father would not have sacrificed a walk-on part in a beer commercial for the health of one of his children, and I suddenly realised what I had never realised before; that a politician must have an ego and an ambition every bit as massive as any great actor.

  A dog began barking somewhere beyond the golf course.

  My head jerked up as I slipped the gun’s safety catch to automatic. The dog had begun to howl now, spreading its warning up and down the thin shank of Murder Cay.

  The floodlights were switched on again. Their sudden blaze was blinding and terrifying, but I could just see t
he dark shape of the tower window beyond the floodlights’ glare, and so I aimed the gun at that dark rectangle. I waited.

  Then, seemingly all at once, I heard a truncated shout of terror, the belch of a sub-machine-gun firing, and the dog’s howl turning to a scream that was chopped brutally short. A heavy machine-gun opened fire from the tower. I saw the gun’s muzzle flash as a stunted dark red flame in the window, then I lost sight of that flame for I had pulled the Kalashnikov’s trigger and my own muzzle was pulsing an almost invisible but intrusive light from which the green tracer rounds were spitting lazily away.

  I had aimed high and left. I dropped the barrel, edged it right, and it seemed to me that my green fire was being swallowed in the dark shadowy hole of the tower window. The far machine-gun stopped abruptly.

  I too stopped firing. I could smell the gun’s propellant in the air; sour and thin. Adrenalin coursed warm through my blood. My heart was thumping.

  I heard shouts. The sub-machine-gun fired again and I saw a floodlight explode. Sparks crackled from the broken light fixture. A second light went dark as the Maggot shattered it, but enough lights remained to turn the island into a deathtrap. I aimed at a light and extinguished it with a short burst, then heard the first whipcrack of return fire slash terrifyingly over my head. The enemy was firing at the source of my green tracer. A bullet struck the radio mast to ring the structure like a bell. I fired to kill another light, but still more lamps were being lit as people woke in the houses and turned on their garden floodlights. I hoped the senator and Maggot were already retreating because we had only one course of action now, and that was to pile into the rigid-raider and light out through the reefs at top speed.

  Another machine-gun opened fire from my right, but the new gunner was disoriented and fired wildly across the golf course.

  Then an explosion split the night with white fire and a noise like concentrated thunder. A brilliant streak of flame lanced skywards and I realised it had to be the fuel tank of the generator blowing up because a second or two after the explosion all the remaining lights on the island flickered and died. All that was left was the churning flames of the burning gasoline that lit the underside of a thick billow of dark smoke.

  Smoke! When in doubt, use smoke! I took a handful of the flares from the Maggot’s kit bag, scraped the cap off one to ignite it and hurled it as far as I could towards the golf course. Orange smoke plumed and thickened and was carried on the east wind towards me. I waited till the smoke was all around me, then, abandoning the machine-gun for a moment, I sprinted forward till I was close to the smoking flare. A machine-gun fired ahead of me and a stream of bullets whined and flickered somewhere to my left. I took another flare and hurled it forward again, thickening the smoke and trying to make a corridor down which Maggot and the senator could escape. I had reached the coarse grass of the fairway now. I hurled a third flare, then turned back towards the radio mast. A stream of tracer bullets sawed through the smoke. I heard the bullets crashing and whining in the metal lattice of the radio mast to sound like a mad orchestra of steel percussion.

  The bullet stream jerked towards me and I dropped flat. The second enemy machine-gun fired wildly above my head, then I heard the thud of boots running to my left. “Maggot!”

  “I’m here, Nick!”

  I clambered to my feet and ran towards the safety of the radio mast’s huge concrete base. The Maggot was already there, his rifle levelled above the concrete. The senator was hunched low, breathing hard and looking as though he wished he had brought a rifle. Or stayed in Washington. The sky was a cacophony of bullets. “What happened?” I shouted at the Maggot.

  “Guard dog!” he shouted back. “I had to shoot the bloody thing when it attacked us! Then I dropped a flare into their generator fuel tank.”

  “Well done!”

  The senator half stood beside me and cupped his hands to shout over the sound of the gunfire. He was shaking and his voice had risen an octave in his fear. “I lost the radio! Where’s the spare?”

  “In the boat!” I shouted.

  He turned and looked towards the beach, but the space between us and our boat was laced with enemy tracer and bullets. “Jesus!” I saw him mouth the profanity. He was quivering with terror and I could not blame him. The senator had never before experienced the concentrated fire of automatic weapons. The hammer blows of the machine-guns’ noise was enough to unsettle the brain, let alone the genuine threat of death in the more sibilant passage of their bullets. The senator was just lucky that the bastards weren’t slinging artillery at us.

  “We don’t need a radio!” I yelled the reassurance to him. “As soon as things calm down we’ll get the hell off the island! It won’t be long! They can’t keep using ammunition at this rate!”

  “It was the dog!” the senator shouted, as though it would be useful if he explained precisely how he had lost the radio. “It came for me and I panicked. I dropped the set, you see, and ran.”

  “It doesn’t matter!” I still needed to shout, for the night was cracking with bullets.

  “But we need the radio!” The senator was veering towards hysteria again. “Don’t you understand, Nick, we’ve got to have the radio!”

  “We don’t need a radio! We just need to get the hell out of here!”

  Our chance to get the hell out of Murder Cay came just seconds later when, one by one, the various guns opposing us died away. The Colombians, or whoever it was that fired at us, must have ripped through a ton of ammunition, and now they were calming down. Or perhaps they believed us all to be dead. I waited a few seconds to make certain that the firing really had subsided, then I gestured for the senator to run back to the boat. “Keep low! Wait for us!”

  I lay down behind the machine-gun, ready to offer covering fire if it was needed. The thinning orange smoke still provided protection enough to hide the senator’s lumbering run, for the enemy did not open fire again. Once I saw that the senator had safely reached the boat I tapped the Maggot’s shoulder. “Now you,” I said, “go!”

  But my voice seemed to unleash a new torrent of enemy gunfire that screamed and whiplashed over our heads. The fire clanged on the mast and ricocheted off the concrete. A tracer bullet whined off one of the mast’s wire guy ropes to soar high and scarlet into the night sky. The Maggot had sensibly stayed under cover, and I crouched low beside him, and hoped to God that the senator was also flat on his belly. One of the enemy’s machine-guns had a very harsh, deep and menacing sound, and I guessed it was the half-inch Browning. I knew no flak-jacket could stop one of those rounds, and the best thing we could do was to lie still and pray that our enemies would soon become bored with playing at soldiers.

  “Nick!” The senator was suddenly shouting at me from the beach. “Nick!” He had to scream to be heard over the sound of the gunfire.

  I turned and swore helplessly.

  Out in the lagoon was the white bone of a bow wave and the plume of a high-speed wake. A powerboat had circled the southern part of the island and was now speeding to cut off our retreat. “Stay still!” I shouted to the Maggot and the senator, hoping that immobility would hide our exact position, but I could have saved my breath for suddenly a trail of sparks twisted and climbed into the night from the approaching boat. The trail was the wake of a parachute flare that cracked open to illuminate the whole sky with its brilliant white light. The flare also served as a signal for the guns in the houses to cease their fire. The white light illuminated the whole western coast of Murder Cay, sharply revealing our beached and stranded boat in a pitiless white glare.

  I was turning the machine-gun, settling its bipod and rearranging its heavy tail of bullets. I was slow, but the Kalashnikov really needed a two-man crew. “Fire at it, Maggot!” I shouted, but the men on the boat fired first and I saw their tracer, green like mine, flick low across the water. The senator was running towards us, his face a rictus of terror, but the gunner in the powerboat was not aiming for the senator, rather for our inflatable, and his ai
m was all too good for I could hear his bullets pounding and tearing at the stiff fabric tubes of the big rigid-raider. More and more of the bullets beat and thrashed at the dying boat.

  I opened fire and my green tracer crossed theirs, and I dipped my line of green fire just as the men in the boat saw the danger and rammed their throttles forward. They were too late. My Kalashnikov’s jacketed bullets sliced into the powerboat like a chainsaw, and I saw the craft shuddering and twisting under the impact, then the boat accelerated crazily ahead so that its own machine-gun was thrown off balance and spewed its stream of tracer fire high into the air.

  I paused to thread a new belt into the Kalashnikov. The powerboat turned away from us. It was running at full speed now and I guessed that the frightened helmsman was trying to find the channel through the Devil’s Necklace, but instead he hit a submerged coral head and the boat reared up into the air, aiming for the moon, and I saw the transom come clear of the water and in the dying light of the white flare I could see the whole open cockpit displayed towards us. A man was falling clear. The Maggot whooped at our victory, which was really no victory for we had lost our own boat. The enemy’s boat was also lost. The water spraying from its twin jet drives looked exactly like two rocket exhausts trying to hurl the sharp-nosed hull up to the stars, but then gravity won and the whole sleek craft turned on its back and crashed sickeningly down into the sea. White water splayed outwards, then the parachute flare died and we could see nothing more.

  “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” The senator seemed to be hyperventilating.

  The smoke was clearing ahead of us, thinning and shredding above the golf course’s narrow fairway. The generator’s fuel tank still burned, but less fiercely now so that it cast a much smaller light.

  I walked back to the water’s edge. Our enemies beyond the golf course had been blinded by the parachute flare, so for a few seconds it was safe to risk the open ground. I jumped down to the beach to see that our boat had been effectively destroyed. The inflatable had been equipped with seven separate air chambers, and any three were sufficient to keep the hull afloat, but only one of the compartments had survived the flail of bullets. Most of our ammunition seemed intact, and I hurled those boxes ashore. The big Thermos of coffee was shattered, and the sandwiches I had made on board Coffinhead’s boat had been soaked by salt water.