Darkest Instinct

TWENTY-ONE

The tropical maelstrom, which the Tau Cross had carefully sluiced through by keeping at the outer fringes of the storm, had been nothing compared with the North Atlantic sea squall that Warren Tauman had endured coming over from England. In the earlier storm, the waves were as tall as houses, and he’d been hurt and had to handle every problem with a sprained ankle and a snapped mast. He and the Tau Cross had limped over the ocean after that for days, and he’d feared that he would never see land again; he’d found no wind for seventy-two hours and had to rely on his diesel motors and his less than keen sense of direction. Somehow he’d gotten hopelessly lost, his ship having passed through the western Caribbean waters and amid any number of small island ports, none of which he had seen until he’d come far to the southeast of America and sighted land- the Dominican Republic. He’d put to port there, but for only a brief few days, finding it less than hospitable, and even before all necessary repairs to his ship could be done-largely due to the fact that he could find no one capable or quick enough-he left this island world only to locate another: Cayman Brae Island, as he came to know it later.

Cayman Brae was like a godsend. He’d been alone for too long with his thoughts and Mother, who taunted him, telling him he was a fool and that he would die alone at sea. But his spirit guide deposited him instead at the Cayman Islands. The Caymans were composed of three islands: Grand Cayman, Little Cayman and Cayman Brae. All were at low elevations, but Cayman Brae rose 140 feet into the sky with its limestone bluffs, and it became a beacon for him that morning after leaving the inhospitable Dominican shore. He saw Cayman Brae rise from the water like some sort of Loch Ness Monster, yet it was nonthreatening, beautiful. He stayed on at Cayman Brae for two weeks while true craftsmen worked on his mast and windows and whatever else needed repair, paying in funds still available to him on his mother’s life insurance policy. As for the more serious problems with navigational equipment-nav, as the seasoned sailors called it-computer hardware and software damage, he’d have to await his arrival in America. In Cayman Brae he learned just how close he was to America, to Florida waters.

While remaining in the safe port during that time period, Warren had wisely restrained from any hunting and killing until all repairs were finished and paid for. He’d stocked new food, fixed broken equipment, beefed up weak points in the boat and rigging, repaired old sails and got some new ones. After that, he began exploring each of the three islands in the chain, and while doing so, he began to collect a handful of willing victims.

Now he raced for this safe port again, low on food but with his boat intact and sound. He sat at the navigation station, studying weather maps. Sitting in this area of the cabin was a bit like sitting at the center of a teacup; at the center of the cup was the nav station. His chair faced a phalanx of electronic equipment, blipping radar screens, computers, radios and instruments towering to the cabin’s ceiling. At the top was a portable CD player strapped in with bungee cords. From here, he could read wind speed true, wind direction and wind speed apparent in the bright red letters of the light-emitting diodes before him.

The chair and the table were gimbaled, so as the boat leaned to one side or the other, Warren could sit perfectly level to work, eat or drink. He studied the weather maps every day, each generated from his own on-board computer weather station. A lean man at six-two, he averaged 170 pounds but burned them like a panther. On a one-man sailboat where speed and progress depended on reading and agilely responding to wind and waves, his incessant activity-trimming and changing sails, tweaking this, modifying that-translated into miles between him and Tampa Bay, the Florida authorities and the FBI.

So now Warren was blasting along on a calm and unhurried West Caribbean wind at about twenty-five knots, allowing the autopilot to steer while he checked the maps again. From what his speed and the maps were telling him, he knew now that he must rig the new sail, his old one having been shredded by the storm at his back after an abrupt wind shift. Warren went above deck and wrestled with an enormous snake-actually, a giant sock encasing a new sail which he’d purchased in Sanibel Island during his stay there. He knew it would take him two, possibly three hours to get the new sail up, more if the old sail were to get knotted in the rigging. But it was his only chance to hook up with the Caribbean sailboat race called the Jamaica Run that he intended to infiltrate and ride in on. It made perfect sense, if he could time it exactly right, for entering Cayman was like finding a postage stamp out there, and the race would act both as a guide-thanks to more experienced sailors than he-and as a cover. Entering port at Cayman amid such confusion and mayhem would afford the perfect cover. If he could only pull it off. The new sail, too, with its sundial face, would fit right in with the racers.

The sock system made it a great deal easier for one person to handle such a large sail. Still, it took an hour just to hook each eye. But then he was ready to raise one end of the enclosed sail to the top of the mast on a halyard. It took another hour and a half, using a system of lines and pulleys on the sock itself, to raise the sail to its full height. He secured lines to the color-coded lines which fed back into the boat’s cockpit and allowed him to raise, lower or reef his sails with assurance. He now tugged on a line, and the sock slowly and by increments rose, heavy as hell, finally to the top of the mast, where it billowed sheetlike in the strong trade wind.

Satisfied, Warren Tauman pounded his chest at his single-handed accomplishment, sweat pouring from his brow, the sun burning into his scalp, his tan lines showing now.

He went below again and checked his course. The autopilot had kept him nearly perfect. He made up for the machine and reset the autopilot before going to his port charts. He had charts for Brazil, South America, Puerto Rico, Mexico and other places, as well as the Cayman and Jamaican Islands. He had to have a chart for any port he might visit. He’d have to check in with the port authorities in any country he visited, and thus far his alias had held and he’d aroused no suspicions in the Cayman Islands, but he planned on creating a new set of papers and a new alias before reaching the islands, just to be sure. It hadn’t hurt that he’d greased a few palms there during his last visit. He knew who to see and where to see them.

The Tau Cross carried a system that captured satellite photographs around the clock, and Warren analyzed the photos religiously while alone at sea; it only made good sense and was a safety precaution to do so. Still relatively new at being a sailor, he’d learned much during his crossing of the great Atlantic, in a kind of ordeal by fire. He knew that in the southern latitudes, storms rolled out of nowhere without warning, so he must be ever vigilant. On his weather charts, these low-pressure storms appeared to be so many malignant growths, and from these big lows many small tentacles grew, twisted and gnarled to become as treacherous as the mother storm. It was from one of these he was now running.

He had an eighty-five-foot-high mast, enough to cause alarm in any storm. Thank God he had two large inboard motors to fall back on. These motors also charged the batteries that ran the autopilot, computers, radar and other electronics. Losing power was high on Warren’s nightmare list, for this meant losing communication, information and the crucial help of the autopilot, which freed him to cook, clean, repair, navigate, sleep and do other extracurricular activities, such as enjoy himself with the ladies whenever one was brazen and stupid enough to choose to step aboard his death ship.

He was mildly worried now. Pushing a boat twenty-four hours a day was a recipe for system failure, as an old sailor in Key West had once warned him. He recalled his trouble coming over, the moment when the boat fell off a wave like a truck from a bridge. He’d felt the sickening jolt in his bones and teeth, as when Mother had once struck him so hard he’d fallen unconscious. The ship, as it had come crashing down off that wave, had shivered and flexed her entire length like a dying horse, and he knew something big was wrong. He prayed to his gods even as he stared out at the one remaining mast that night to see it bowing like a bone about to break. He could see that a metal fitting clasp, holding a crucial support stay halfway up the mast, had snapped, and that it just hung there, a useless ornament blowing in the storm. By then his other two, smaller masts were long gone. And by this time, Warren had done all he could to save the boat from capsizing, so all he was left with was the wheel. It took all his strength to hold the wheel against the storm while he’d continued to pray.

He recalled the nightmare vividly. How that dark night in the Atlantic a huge wave smashed the Tau Cross and snapped off the two weaker masts and drove the mid-ship mast down to dip into the water. Water spilled over her decks and into the cabin, the floor and the nav station awash in it. Tools, plastic bags, food, parts, computer paper and a printer and other things were left floating about. Canned goods and equipment manuals had taken flight.

Then the blackness of the storm had somehow grown even darker than Warren imagined possible, a kind of black-green both inside and outside the cabin, and Warren, terrified of dying before completing his mission in life, huddled below. He felt the pressure on his ears, his chest, his heart. He was going to die here, like this, alone, just as his dead mother’s voice had told him he would, his life unfulfilled while Mother smiled down on his pitiable situation.

Mother always had the last laugh. Suddenly a window had exploded, bursting inward with wind and water, which flooded through as it to punctuate his dark, embracing resignation of death.

Even before the w indow had blown, he had realized that his ship was over in the water farther than any ship had a right to be. But then, she righted like a cork, bobbing upright, as if to curse the powers of the ocean, to defy them. She continued to flounder about all that night, and Warren grew violently ill, but never did the Tau dip so low again into the water, and the window only took on rainwater after that.

It was as if he’d been given a sign, that he must go forth, that his own gods would not allow those of the sea-or those devils that drove Mother-to end Warren’s career; that he would give offerings and sacrifices in the form of humans to Tau, since Tau in turn protected him.

Last night’s storm which had chased Warren down the Gulf and the one chasing in from west of his position now were no match for the Tau Cross, Warren assured himself. He would, in a matter of fifteen, maybe sixteen hours, be on the Cayman Islands. Once there, he’d start over.

Mother whispered otherwise, her voice hiding in the trade winds, mewing like a grinning cat, saying, “You’ll suffer now, Warren… They’re after you, and they will catch you, and they will burn and torture you in ways I never burned or tortured you-in ways you never imagined possible…”

“ Shut up, you dead bitch! Shut up!” Warren screamed at the wind.

Jessica and Eriq’s flight to the Cayman Islands, with its detour to Miami, was clear and bright and smooth and without complication. Once they came on radar at Miami International, Don Lansing took the controls and did the honors, impressing Jessica with his nerve at bringing in such a small plane amid such giants as the 747s and wide- bodied jumbos, which looked like modern-day dinosaurs and fire-farting dragons.

While Eriq had been catching some sleep in the rear. Jessica had asked Don to tell her more about himself. He’d gone directly from high school into the military and had done a stint as a pilot in Desert Storm, he told her. She was once again impressed.

“ What kind of planes?”

“ Nothing too romantic. ARFs-Aerial Reconnaissance Flights. Photographing-low-level spying, I guess you’d call it. I didn’t see any real action, although my plane took a couple of flak hits.”

“ So, are you sorry you didn’t get to drop any bombs?”

“ No… not really… Managed to get back with a fairly clean conscience and a healthy respect for life…”

“ So, why isn’t a good-looking young man like yourself married?” she asked him.

“ Guess that’d be my fault. I keep running from any kind of real commitment, I guess. Don’t ever feel ready, mature enough, secure enough, you know, in myself.”

She nodded her understanding.

“ But there is this one girl,” he confided. “If ever I’m going to take the plunge…”

She smiled knowingly, and they heard Eriq groan as he shook himself awake, terribly uncomfortable in the tiny space they all occupied.

Once on the ground, they all had jobs to do. Don refueled and filed their flight plan. Eriq contacted the Miami bureau of the FBI to let people there know their plans, and he also gathered drinks and sandwiches for the three of them, while Jessica contacted the MPD, leaving word with the chief of police and talking to Dr. Andrew Coudriet, who had information from Moyler in England. One of Allain’s prints which earlier had been sent to Moyler had found a match with one taken for an insurance policy in England for a schoolboy named Warren Tauman. Moyler’s fax, according to Andrew Coudriet, was most definite: Allain and Tauman were one and the same.

“ Jackpot,” said Jessica over the phone to Dr. Coudriet. “Now if we can only corner the bastard.”

“ I have a feeling that if anyone can, you will. Dr. Coran.” Now, a little over an hour out of Miami International, Jessica watched Cuba appear and dissolve below them, as they had to fly above Cuban airspace in order to safely avert any problems there. Once across Cuban airspace, they descended. All of this gave Jessica a great opportunity at the controls, and Lansing seemed pleased to allow her to enjoy herself.

Below them sprawled the glittering, sun-dappled east Caribbean Sea on their southward tack for the three British islands which together formed a crown colony.

They’d stayed on this course for an additional few hours when suddenly the lush islands came into view. They were as breathtaking as when last Jessica had seen them in the company of a past love, Captain Alan Rych- man, now Commissioner Rychman of the NYPD. She recalled their having dived the crystal-blue waters off Grand Cayman, a twenty-two-mile-long island, eight miles at its widest point, located some two hundred miles northwest of the west end of Jamaica and a hundred miles south of Cuba.

Still, even the gorgeous sight of the Caymans below couldn’t dispel the fact that Jessica had become frustrated, as had Eriq, who remained silent in the rear. She could sense his seething. They had seen nothing whatever of the fleeing Tau Cross and their fugitive. Lansing, too, had gone silent, sensing that the mood inside the small space they occupied had soured considerably.

With the wind at their backs, they had made good time and fuel consumption had not been a problem. Their having had to fly over Cuban airspace at a safe distance had, however, presented one problem: It had taken them to such altitudes that their eyes were for a time useless in attempting to spot Patric Allain’s boat, if it was down there. By the time they were able to return to eye level, hundreds upon hundreds of nautical miles had gone un- searched.

There had been so much to cover the man’s tracks; so much in nature had conspired against Jessica that it angered her. The other two islands here, located approximately eighty miles northeast of Grand Cayman, were Little Cayman at ten miles long and two miles wide, and Cayman Brae, twelve miles long and one and a quarter miles wide. The islands looked like jewels spread across the satin-blue water from this distance up; created of coral, the soil was fertile, and Jessica recalled a people of grace and good cheer and beautiful features.

Jessica knew from her previous visit that fishing, shipbuilding and stock raising were the chief industries here. The place was also good for thatch rope, mahogany, turtle shells, green turtles, shark skins, cattle and ponies. She’d done a bit of research back then, learning that Genoese- born navigator Christopher Columbus had discovered the islands in 1503 and had named them the Tortugas-Spanish for Turtle Islands. The place still literally “crawled” with turtles.

The Cayman Islands were colonized sometime around 1734 by the British, the records not being exact, and before becoming a separate British colony in 1959, the island government was a dependency of the Jamaican colony, and as recently as 1962, it had maintained status as part of the Federation of the West Indies.

With but a hundred square miles of land, the island population was crowded at twelve hundred permanent residents, and during peak holiday seasons, when the big cruise ships brought in the tourists and the grandiose sea-hugging hotels were full to bursting, the island could hardly bear the burden of people.

Jessica was disappointed that they’d seen no sailing vessel that might approximate the one they were looking for, but it made sense. They were a day ahead of the sailing vessel now, despite its having had a six-hour head start on them. Then again, perhaps nature had taken its vengeance on Tauman; perhaps he was floating hundreds of feet below the surface somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico where his ship had gone down in bad weather. One could only hope, but such a death was too good for the man. Perhaps, Jessica mused, there was no death other men could design that was not too good for him.

She would inquire when she arrived at George Town, the capital of the Cayman Islands, if there had been any reports of ships in distress in the Caribbean Sea, the Yucatan Channel or the great Gulf.

They were within sight of George Town now and she saw banners strung across one port, perhaps there to welcome an incoming cruise ship that they’d witnessed easing toward the island at what appeared to be the pace of a snail. Yet the floating building with its Norwegian markings had moved surprisingly far by the time they’d turned into the wind to make their final approach, Lansing having studied the air currents to make his determination.

He was a good pilot; Jessica silently congratulated herself at having found him back in Tampa, but she was too busy admiring the island below to verbalize her good fortune. From up here, the entire island blinked with white houses and orange-tiled roofs.

Earlier, Jessica had asked Don Lansing to radio ahead to have authorities meet them at the airport, specifically Ja Okinleye, if possible. The tower at the quaint little airstrip below had radioed back that their message had been forwarded to the “correct Royal authorities.” Now aligned with the airport in the distance, one single, long black strip and a small building in typical British Isles architecture, they quickly descended under the assault of the wind at the nose of the ship.

Jessica asked Lansing to again radio ahead to ask for the chief investigatory officer, Ja Okinleye, to meet them at the airport, and it was relayed back to them that Okinleye had been contacted. Now Lansing told them to ready for landing as he got his final clearance, although at such a late moment in the landing that he could only laugh and wryly reply, “Thanks, guys!”

The approach was smooth and effortless, despite a brisk, buffeting wind which threatened havoc. Lansing laughingly said, “The wind’s a funny animal, like Huey, Dewey and Louie: You never know what they’re going to give you.”

“ Sounds like a Gumpism to me,” said Santiva in the rear.

“ Call it a Donism,” Lansing replied.

Out her small side portal, Jessica could see an official- looking vehicle with a Cayman Island flag on each front bumper and two officers in dress whites-which amounted to long pants in this subtropical heat-standing nearby. One appeared to be Okinleye. In a moment the tiger-striped plane bounced shakily on and along the runway, their speed decreased to nil and they turned to taxi onto a side strip.

Moments later, they deployed from the plane directly onto the asphalt, where Ja Okinleye personally met them, his hand extended in a warm gesture of greeting. “Dr. Coran! It is a wonderment to see you, and we are so pleased to have you back with us again in our paradise.”

“ I wish we were just here to enjoy your paradise, my friend.” Jessica saw that Okinleye’s man had gone directly to the plane, ostensibly to see to their bags but with an obvious eye to any cargo aboard. Finding neither cargo nor bags, he was stumped, so he raised both shoulders to his smiling boss.

Jessica turned to Santiva, who had weathered the trip well by sleeping much of the way, and added for Ja’s benefit, ‘ ‘This is Chief Eriq Santiva, the man I work for nowadays, Ja.”

“ I am so pleased to make with your acquaintance, sir.” Okinleye looked about for their bags as he vigorously shook Santiva’s hand. “My aide, Kili, he will see to your bags. Where are you staying, my friends?”

“ ‘ Fraid we haven’t any bags, Ja,” confessed Jessica, a frown puckering her lips, “only what’s on our backs. We left in something of a hurry.” Jessica noticed the pained expression on Don Lansing’s face. “And as for reservations… well, we have none.”

“ Oh, not good… it is the height of the season… You will then stay with me and my family in my humble abode?”

“ We couldn’t put you out, Ja.”

“ Please, it is not a bother.”

“ Well… first things first,” said Santiva. “Have you had any word or inkling on the approach of this boat we’re chasing?”

“ No, none whatsoever. I only hope you are correct in assuming he will be corning this way.”

“ We’re ahead of him, Eriq, but he’ll be along,” Jessica assured Santiva and Ja Okinleye at the same time.

Ja smiled and said in a mirthful tone, “Is that what your instincts tell you?”

“ Yes… yes, it is. That and the difference between nautical miles and air flight.”

“ Well then, Chief Okinleye,” Eriq interrupted, swallowing hard, “maybe we’ll take you up on that offer of hospitality, after we stop at one of your local stores to pick up a few essentials?”

“ Not a problem. We will drive you to wherever you need go, right, Kili?” The silent, uniformed Kili eagerly nodded.

With this settled, Jessica turned to Don Lansing and thanked him for his help, paying him three times what his normal fee would have been. He stared at the cash as if it meant an operation for his kid sister or dog, his eyes sparkling. “Maybe this’ll help me make that commitment we talked about.”

She gave him a crooked smile. “I rather doubt it.”

“ This kind of dough… you sure you don’t want me to hang around for a flight back, maybe?”

“ What I’m going to need here is a helicopter, and I think Okinleye will point us in the right direction for that. Again, many thanks for getting us here so quickly, Don.”

“ Don’t mention it; my pleasure.”

“ You heading straight back?”

“ Yeah… my boss-partner-is going to be wondering what’n hell happened to me and his plane, so I’d better move it, yeah…”

Jessica, Santiva and Okinleye rushed now for the waiting official car which would take them from the broiler plate of the asphalt. It must be one hundred thirty degrees in the shade, she thought. A glance back showed Jessica that pilot Lansing still could not believe he had been a part of all this. Maybe the little Cayman Island flags on Ja’s official car were too much for him, she mirthfully thought.