Crackdown

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 pouch 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.

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 the 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 aim 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.

The senator joined me in the tangled sodden mess and, with a cry of triumph, produced the spare VHF radio, which had been protected from the sea by a waterproof case. He extended the radio’s stubby aerial, then crouched under the tiny bluff that edged the beach. “Stingray, Stingray,” I heard him gabble, and I guessed that the adrenalin and fear had curdled his memory.

“The word you want is Mayday!” I called to him.

“Mayday, Stingray. Acknowledge please.” He spoke with frantic urgency, so much so that it seemed to me that he must have lost his marbles, but then he offered me a curiously reassuring smile. “It’s OK, Nick, help will come.”

“Sure,” I said. “God will send a flight of killer-angels.” I cupped my hands and shouted at the Maggot to join us. “Bring the machine-gun!”

“What do we do now?” The Maggot asked when he reached us. The senator was fumbling with the transmit button, still desperately filling the airwaves with his message.

“We’ll work our way south.” I nodded towards the scrub-land that edged the airstrip. “We’ll carry as much ammunition as we can, and dump the rest. We’ll cross the island and steal one of the boats from the anchorage.” I grinned, pretending a confidence I did not feel.

“Nick! Nick!” The senator interrupted me. “It’s the radio! It’s not working!”

“You want Channel Sixteen,” I said patiently, “and just shout Mayday into it, then tell whoever answers that we’re under attack on Murder Cay.”

“But it’s broken!” the senator insisted, and I could see he was close to panicking again. I took the radio from him and found that a neat hole had indeed been punched clean through its casing. The radio must have been hit by one of the rounds fired from the powerboat, and it was now useless. “But we need it!” The senator stared at me, appalled.

“Forget it!”

“We’ll be stuck here!” The senator was shaking again.

“We won’t be stuck here! Trust me!” I pushed the Maggot’s bag of spare ammunition at the senator. “Carry that. We’re going to be all right, I promise! Let’s go!”

We hurried south, leaving the shattered boat behind. Our enemies, their night vision still not recovered from the flare’s brilliance, did not see us leave for, after a moment or two, they resumed firing at the base of the radio mast. I heard their bullets ring clear in the night, then a more muffled sound made me turn and curse.

“What?” the senator asked worriedly.

But before I could explain a sudden explosion cracked huge and violent in the lagoon. The plume of smoke and water shot fifty feet into the air. “The bastards have got a mortar!” I said in astonishment. The muffled sound I had first heard had been the mortar firing.

“Not bad for a bunch of narcotraficantes,” the Maggot said in wry admiration. “So where did they get that baby? Do you think they stole it from the Colombian army?”

“Who the hell cares?” The senator flinched as another bomb exploded far away. “I need a radio! I need a radio!”

“We’re going to find a radio!” I snapped. “We’re going to find a boat, and boats have radios. So come on!”

Our enemy had lost us for the moment, but I feared for our survival all the same. The mortar fired another bomb towards the base of the radio mast, but sooner or later the drug-runners would realise we had abandoned that shelter and then they would turn the lethal bombs towards the rest of the small island which offered precious little cover from the explosions. Which meant our best hope lay in finding a boat and then, ignominiously, running away.

We walked across the island, hidden from our enemies by the scrub that grew thickly to the north of the airstrip. The Maggot seemed excited by the gunfire, while the senator was merely desperate to find a radio. He had a moment’s wild hope when he noticed a twin-engined plane sitting under a crude palm-thatch shelter, but when the Maggot climbed on to the aircraft’s wing and opened its door, he saw that all the aircraft’s instruments and controls had been ripped out. “It looks like my plane,” he announced cheerfully.

“I need a–” The senator began his demand, but I was bored with his whining insistence and cut him off too sharply.

“I told you! We are going to find a fucking radio on board a fucking boat!”

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this!” the senator complained.

“Don’t squabble, girls,” the Maggot said, “not when we’re having such fun.”

Our enemies were having less fun than before. They still fired some sporadic shots across the golf course, and their mortar thumped another half-dozen bombs towards the beach where we had landed, but their firing was tentative, almost as though they were puzzled by our lack of response. Or perhaps they were merely distracted by their other problems, the chief of which was that the fire, which the Maggot had started by shoving a flare into the generator’s petrol tank, was burning much more fiercely now. I saw a palm tree flash into sudden bright flame and spew sparks that whirled away across the island’s narrow waist. The light of the fire was bright on the big house with the tower and the small radar aerial.

We were far beyond the light thrown by the crackling flames. Instead we were hidden deep in a cloaking darkness as we walked past one of the big black trucks that still blocked the island’s runway. Off to our right we heard an engine start up, then a pair of headlights flared bright across the golf course and I suspected that the jeep with its rear-mounted machine-gun had been sent to find us, but the vehicle drove north, away from us, so for the moment we could safely ignore it.

We hurried on while, to our north, the jeep enfiladed the concrete foundation block of the mast and the heavy machine-gun pumped a stream of futile bullets into the shadowed space which we had long vacated. I knew it would only be seconds now before they discovered our absence, after which our enemies would begin searching the island in earnest.

But then, at last, the lagoon’s anchorage stretched open and serene in front of us. A dozen boats floated on the water’s sheer black surface that was glossed red by the flames. Closer at hand was the ruined beach house which offered a shadowed hiding place where the three of us crouched just a few paces from the water’s edge. “What we have to do now,” I said, “is swim to the nearest boat, turn on its electrics and call for help.”

“I’ll go,” the Maggot said.

“No!” The senator insisted. “I will.”

“You both go,” I made the decision, “and I’ll give you covering fire from here.” One of us had to stay behind to offer protective fire. “Swim slowly.” I took the Kalashnikov from the Maggot. “And don’t splash. Once you’re on board, stay there! If I can’t reach you, then try and get yourselves the hell out of here.”

The Maggot frowned at the note of resigned pessimism in my voice. “I’ll stay with you, Nick.”

“I don’t need anyone to stay with me,” I said petulantly. “They’ve lost us, so there’s no immediate danger, but the sooner we’re all on the boat, the better. One of us has to be arse-end Charlie, and that one’s me. So go!” I turned away from them, intimating I had no more to say, and hefted the Russian machine-gun on to the makeshift breastwork of the ruined wall. I aimed the gun at the nearest house which was no more than two hundred paces away. The building was dark and seemingly deserted.

The Maggot and the senator abandoned their boots and flak-jackets; then, wearing only their lightweight fatigues, they waded into the lagoon and breast-stroked through the limpid black water. The Maggot had strapped the M16 across his back, but had left his sub-machine-guns on the beach. The closest motor-cruiser, a sports-fisherman, was no more than sixty yards away.

I watched them swim for a moment, then turned to stare towards the blazing fire which silhouetted the southernmost houses. Stingray. That was the word the senator had used on the radio, and Stingray was the name of the US naval exercise that had filled the Bahamian seaways with lean grey ships and the island bars with boisterous sailors. I turned and gazed at the two shapes which swam so soft and slow towards the powerboat. Stingray. And I remembered how, on the day that the senator had come to find me on Straker’s Cay, he had gone on to a reception at the American Embassy in Nassau where he had met officers from the Stingray fleet. And that very same day he had turned up in the unlikely company of the Maggot. And that reminded me of an earlier question: exactly how had the senator found the Maggot?

The two men had reached the transom of the big sports-fisherman, and I watched as the Maggot’s huge dark shape moved cautiously up the boat’s stern ladder. A few seconds later I heard a splintering crack as the main-cabin door was forced. I guessed the Maggot was now searching for the electrical master switch. After that he would have to find the secondary switches to power the radio circuit, then discover the radio itself.

The senator climbed the stern ladder. None of the Colombians seemed to have noticed what was happening in the lagoon. What had the Maggot called the Colombians? Narcotraficantes, I had noted his use of that word, and wondered at it, because the Maggot was not usually a man to dignify someone with a proper noun when an improper word would suffice. I stared at the dark shape of the boat from which the Maggot was undoubtedly sending the radio message. But to whom?

Illusion, I thought to myself, everything is illusory. Truth is so slippery. The art of politics, like the art of the theatre, is to create a perfect illusion. It had taken a politician to make a simulacrum of Camelot in the twentieth century, and he had done it so perfectly that no one noticed that the Knights of the Round Table were being sent to be slaughtered in Vietnam. The voters had wanted the illusion. “You have to remember,” my father liked to say, “that the bard was wrong. Not all the world’s a stage, most of it is an auditorium instead. Some of us are born to entertain, while the lumpen mass is born to be amused. But do remember, dear boy, that it is that lumpen audience which pays, and we performers who take their money. I make a bad audience, but am a great and rich performer; while you, Nick, are in danger of becoming a poor and astonishingly credulous spectator.” He had despised my naïvety, wanting me to make the falsehoods of the stage into my avocation, but I had rebelled, preferring credulity to skill, innocence to knowledge, and naïvety to cynicism. I still preferred truth to lies, yet somewhere in this night’s darkness I knew there was a great dark lie that I had been made to serve.

“Nick!” the Maggot suddenly hissed across the black water. “Nick! It’s OK! Come on!”

The summons undoubtedly meant that the radio message had been successfully sent, and doubtless the sensible thing for me to do was to join the two Americans on the boat, but it was dawning on me that I had been tricked and harried into coming to Murder Cay to ride shotgun for a purpose that had never been revealed; and I sensed, too, that no one but me cared what might have happened to Ellen. The senator did not care if she was raped and had died, because he had his own agenda. But Ellen had become my agenda.

So I ignored the Maggot’s summons.

Instead, I stood up, looped the belt of heavy linked cartridges around my neck, and picked up the machine-gun. While my enemies regrouped, I would find my woman. My cue had come at last, and it was time to leave the credulous audience and become a performer, making my entrance according to a stage direction I would write myself; enter from the night a deceived lover, armed and angry, seeking truth.

The Maggot hissed at me to join them on board their boat. I walked away. I was angry, but at who and what I was not sure. My anger made me careless. I made no attempt to hide, but just strolled up the beach carrying the heavy Kalashnikov.

My actions were not quite so foolhardy as they seemed, for the beach on the eastern side of Murder Cay was backed by a sand bluff nearly six feet high, and, by stooping, I could have walked almost the whole length of the island concealed from anyone who might have watched from the houses. But at that moment I did not care about concealment for the madness was on me; the insane conviction that I was armoured by righteousness and that no harm could therefore come to me.

A mortar bomb fluttered far overhead, dropping somewhere near the runway. A white parachute flare followed the bomb to explode over the island’s centre before drifting down behind its straggling plume of brightly lit smoke. Another flare was fired to burn brilliantly above the ruined beach house. The flares cast shadows as black as the mouth of hell, and I was walking in one such inky shadow.

I was walking towards the northernmost house which I believed belonged to Jesse Sweetman and to which, I was sure, Ellen had been taken. Sweetman had made no secret of his lust for Ellen, and he could clearly afford to pay McIllvanney his pimp-price. I trudged clumsily, my boots sliding in the treacherous sand. I had to negotiate the awkward pilings which supported the wooden piers that jutted off the sandy bluff and led to the private docks. I tripped on a discarded sailboard and banged my head on the low slanting trunk of a palm tree that grew across the sand. The linked ammunition looped round my neck clinked with every step, and the Scorpion slung from my left shoulder kept swinging to crash tinnily against the Kalashnikov, but no one heard me through the din of mortar explosions and the crackle of random gunfire. I plodded heavily on, walking like a man in a dream, and I was still moving in that same dreamlike unreality when I reached Sweetman’s house. I took no soldierly precautions, but simply climbed the wooden steps from the beach and walked across the marble-paved terrace as though I was a welcome visitor. The madness told me I would survive, and perhaps the madness was right, for no one saw me, and no one challenged me, and no one fired at me.

Then the trance snapped as a shadow moved in the flowering shrubs off to my left, and I threw myself sideways, guns and ammunition crashing loud on the marble terrace, and I wrenched the machine-gun round to face the sudden threat, and the Kalashnikov’s steel-clawed bipod scraped on stone as my finger took up the first pressure on the trigger.

Then I froze. Because the threat miaowed, then purred, then rubbed itself soft and warm against my right cheek. Sweat was pouring off me. “Oh, Jesus,” I blasphemed softly, and laid my head on my left forearm.

An explosion jarred me back into alertness. It was a huge explosion, thumping my eardrums and pulsing a sheet of red flame high into the night. I guessed that the fire started by the Maggot had spread to a big tank of cooking gas that supplied the island’s largest house. I could see men running in the garden of that house, fleeing from flames that were leaping as high as the radar aerial on the small tower. A bush crackled into instant fire to stream golden sparks into the night. Behind me the lagoon was being fingered silver by the falling flares.

Those flares were being sprayed haphazardly about the sky, just as the mortar bombs were now being scattered indiscriminately across the island’s open spaces. The mortar seemed to be emplaced in the garden of the house just beyond the raging fire. I could hear men shouting in that garden. Every now and then a machine-gun or rifle would open fire, but without purpose. The narcotraficantes had lost us. They were night-blinded by their own fire and by their flares, and they neither knew how many enemy faced them nor where that enemy was.

The northernmost house lay silent and dark. A hot tub on its terrace seemed to be filled with molten silver where the crescent moon glossed its water. Beyond the tub was a black wall of glass in which one sliding window had been left open. A white curtain stirred in the gap, but I could sense nothing threatening beyond the curtain, and so I stood up and edged round the hot tub’s gleaming water to the open glass door. No one challenged me. I paused by the billowing curtain, listening, but I heard nothing to scare me, and so I walked unopposed and undetected into my enemy’s house. There was a distinct smell of perfume, as though an exotic woman had just left the darkened room. I stood, eyes wide, till a flare cracked apart in the southern sky to cast an eerie white glow through the open window, and I saw that I was in a long elegant room furnished with cushioned wicker furniture. More glass doors opened on to the central courtyard where a swimming pool reflected the flare’s harsh fire. The walls of the elegant room were hung with fine antique prints; the home of a civilised murderer.

I stood utterly still. I was trying to sense danger in this perfumed house, using whatever primitive instincts were left to me, but then a door opened deep in the house, and I saw the flicker of a candle flame and I realised that someone was walking down a long corridor towards me.

One side of the corridor was formed by the glass wall that looked on to the central courtyard while the other was a lined with bookcases. Whoever walked between the books and the glass was shielding the candle flame with his hand so that his forward motion would not extinguish the small light.

It was Rickie, and he came unsuspecting towards me.

He was weaving slightly on the carpeted floor, and staring intently down at the candle. He had left the door at the far end of the corridor open and more candles burned in the room beyond, but I sensed Rickie was alone. He was humming to himself, concentrating on preserving the flickering fragile flame, then he saw the flash-suppressor of the machine-gun pointing at his midriff, and his eyes slowly came up to mine, and the candle dropped to extinguish itself on the floor.

“Hello, Rickie,” I said gently.

He was shaking. He could see me well enough, because I was illuminated by the candles in the room behind him, but I could only dimly see his face. What I glimpsed was not good. He looked ravaged and old before his time. His mouth opened and closed as though he was trying to speak, but he could not, then he began to back away from me with his hands held towards me. “You’re dead!” he said. “They told me you were dead!”

“Your father’s here, Rickie. He’s come to take you away.”

Rickie backed into the candlelit room and I saw just how pale and sick he looked. His one good eye was bloodshot and there were flecks of dried blood at his nostrils. A pulse was racing at his neck. He backed further from me, stopping at a table on which he sat as limply as a puppet loosed of its strings.

“You shouldn’t be here!” he whimpered, and he held his hands towards the walls as though feebly trying to protect the room’s contents, and the odd gesture made me realise just what was being stored in the big, high-ceilinged chamber.

It was the new riches of the Americas.

I was standing among the new gold that flowed to corrupt old nations; the new white gold of cocaine. I was in a room filled with cocaine; a room crammed with plastic-wrapped bales that must have been stuffed with the white crystalline powder. So much powder that I was crunching it beneath my boots because someone, I assumed Rickie, had slashed open one of the bales to pluck out a noseful of heaven.

There was money on the table behind Rickie, and a machine for counting banknotes, and there was also a knife. Rickie picked up the blade and held it towards me, but his threat lacked menace. It was merely a dutiful gesture, and it was no trouble to pluck the blade from his nerveless fingers. He shivered, perhaps thinking that I would attack him with the knife, but instead I went to the piled bales and slashed at their plastic wrappings. I sliced again and again, each cut of the blade spilling more wealth than had ever filled the hold of a galleon sailing from the Spanish Main. The cocaine glittered as it cascaded to the floor and covered the carpet in glinting drifts. I ripped open more of the bellying plastic sacks, burying my hand to its wrist in a flood of pure cocaine. Rickie, watching me, suddenly began to giggle, then to choke, then to laugh. “You’re Nick,” he said at last.

“That’s right.”

“They said they were going to kill you.” He spoke like a small child who had trouble remembering exactly how the syllables should be joined together.

“They tried,” I said, and I slashed into another bale and yet more cocaine hissed and seethed down to the floor. “Where’s Ellen?” I asked.

“Ellen’s pretty.” Rickie was staring with awe at the cocaine that silted the carpet.

“Where is she, Rickie?”

“I have to tell them you’re here, so they can kill you,” he said in a very matter-of-fact voice.

“Of course you do.” I stabbed at plastic, wrenched the blade and watched the powder fall. “But first tell me where Ellen is.”

“You’re a ghost! You’re dead!” Rickie sounded suddenly alarmed, and he began to make curious weaving motions with his hands as though he was trying to ward off my unquiet spirit. His nose had started to trickle blood, and he was crying. He seemed to have disappeared into a private misery of hopeless despair. “You’re dead! Dead!” he screamed at me, spitting sputum and flecks of blood that stained the snow-white powder drifts on the floor. “You’re fucking dead and I hate you!” He hated himself, and he hated me, and he spat at me with pure loathing before shrieking at me to go away.

I dropped the knife into the cocaine, then fired the Kalashnikov. I aimed above and to one side of Rickie’s head. The green fire of the bullets chewed into the wall and the gun’s shattering noise echoed cruelly in the room. Rickie howled and covered his ears, then cowered down to the floor that looked as if it was covered with a new clean fall of snow. His blood was very bright on that new snow.

When the gun stopped firing he looked up at me, wondering whether I was going to kill him or, worse, perhaps hoping that I would.

“Where’s Ellen?” I asked again.

“They’re all next door,” he said in a voice that was as close to madness as any I had ever heard from a human being not on the stage. His words made perfect sense; it was the timbre of his voice that was insane. It was a whining and choking sob from the pits of despair. “All the women are next door in Billingsley’s house. They were put there to keep them safe. I don’t like Billingsley. I really don’t like Billingsley, and he doesn’t like me. No one likes me.” Then he began to weep again, but I no longer cared. I was going next door.

I locked Rickie in the room with his fortune of cocaine, then I walked down the book-lined corridor, across the elegant and perfumed room with its antique prints, and so on to the moon-washed terrace. I climbed over the terrace’s balustrade and edged warily down a steep grassy bank to a strip of sandy ground that separated the northernmost house from Deacon Billingsley’s. The policeman’s house formed three sides of a courtyard that faced towards the sea. The interior of the court was a swimming pool.

I ran up to Billingsley’s terrace, but as I reached the top of the bank a match scraped and flared. I froze. I could smell cigarette smoke, then an armed guard strolled casually from within the courtyard to stand at the far side of the terrace. He did not turn towards me, but instead stared southwards at the flames which were now leaping high above the radar aerial on the tower of the big house. The man had a sub-machine-gun slung from his right shoulder.

He drew on his cigarette, then unzipped his fatigues and began to piss into an ornamental urn where a small shrub grew.

“Drop! Now!” I snapped.

The man turned, still pissing, and scrabbled for the Uzi that was slung on his shoulder, but I was holding the Kalashnikov high and the big gun was aimed directly at the guard’s chest and it slowly dawned on him that if he tried to use his small sub-machine-gun he was very likely to catch a bad case of bullet wounds, so he began to make calming motions at me with his hands and to utter small whimpering noises.

“Get down,” I said, motioning with the big gun, and the man dropped to his knees. He wanted to zip up his fatigues, but when he dropped his hands I shouted at him to raise them again. He disobeyed me, but only to make the sign of the cross. He was shaking.

“Down!” I said again and he dropped flat on his belly. He was still making the small whimpering sounds. He lay just twenty feet away from me, his Uzi close to his right hand. To reach and disarm him I would have to walk in front of the open courtyard and, if any other guards waited in that courtyard, I would be dead.

Yet surely, I thought, the narcotraficantes would not have spared more than one man to guard their women? And I needed to disarm this one man if I was to go inside the house. “Throw your gun in the pool!” I ordered him, but he did not respond except with a quick burst of speech that sounded like a prayer. I supposed he spoke nothing but Spanish, a language I did not speak at all.

“In the pool!” I hissed at him, and made a motion with my own gun to show him what I meant, but he was lying flat and he could not see me properly, and so he did nothing. The Uzi was lying very close to his right hand, too close.

I edged to the corner of the courtyard, peered round, then dodged quickly back. No one had fired at me and I had seen nothing threatening in the deep shadows about the pool. The man on the ground had not tried to retrieve his gun.

I peered round again, this time pausing longer and sweeping the darkness at the pool’s edges with the Kalashnikov. Nothing moved. The man on the ground, clearly terrified, did not move either. I felt the tension ebb out of me. The man was alone.

So I walked across the open flank of the courtyard. The man on the ground was shaking, expecting a bullet in his back, but all I did was to kick his Uzi away from his hand, then I kicked it again so that the weapon splashed into the swimming pool.

And just as it splashed into the pool, so the other gunman, the one who had stayed hidden in the shadowed courtyard, opened fire with another sub-machine-gun. And at that range, even with an inaccurate gun, the second gunman could not miss.

Six bullets struck me. I was standing with my left shoulder towards the house and the bullets whipped across me at chest height.

Five of the bullets struck my rib cage. Or rather they would have struck my rib cage, except that the bullet-proof vest stopped all five. The sixth bullet broke my upper left arm.

It was like being kicked by a carthorse, and I went down like a stunned calf. I gasped once with the shock, then there was a silence until the man who had shot me chuckled softly. Then I heard the click as he changed magazines.

There was no pain at first, just the astonishment of knowing I had been hit. The guard on the ground beside me was scrabbling away from me as though I might bring him bad luck.

I had fallen on top of the Kalashnikov. I rolled over and almost fainted from the pain that slashed at my arm and up into my left shoulder. The Scorpion had been hanging from that shoulder and I tried to reach it with my right hand, but then the man who had shot me was standing at my right side, towering over me, and he contemptuously kicked the little Scorpion away.

“You’re a fucking clown, Breakspear,” the gunman said in his easy, lazy southern voice, “and I hate clowns.” Then he aimed his Uzi right at my forehead and I saw that my death was to be at the hands of Jesse Isambard Sweetman who was still clothed in his dramatic black outfit. His hair was unbound to hang loose either side of his handsome face.

He saw the recognition dawn in my eyes, and that recognition was all he needed to make his victory sweet and complete.

“Where’s Ellen?” I asked him, and could not keep the pain from my voice.

He hesitated, then he smiled. “You’ll never know, will you?”

“Please,” I said.

“How very careless of you to lose her.” He paused, watching me, then laughed softly. “I made her cry out in bed, Breakspear. She wanted it so badly that she cried out for it.”

“Bastard—” I tried to heave up at him, but he stepped back and he levelled the gun again, and still he smiled.

“Carry a message to heaven for me. Just say no.” And he pulled the Uzi’s trigger and the small bullets flicked off the terrace by my left ear and slowly moved away from me because Sweetman had grown a third eye, a black and wet third eye, and he was falling backwards as he squeezed the trigger, and I stared up to see a jet of black glistening blood spurt from that third eye in his forehead.

The blood spurted to fall on me. The guard I had disarmed was scrambling to his feet, calling to the Virgin Mary for aid, but the M16 fired again from my left and the guard pitched forward to fall into the swimming pool.

“Ever since I got this damned gun wet,” the Maggot said, “it won’t fire in bursts.” He climbed up from where he had been hidden by the bluff which edged the beach. “I thought you were coming to join us on the boat!”

I tried to kneel upright, but could not. I was feeling sick and dizzy. I wanted to tell the Maggot that the M16 was a notoriously unreliable weapon and that he should have used a Kalashnikov instead, but I suddenly could not speak. There was vomit in my throat and tears in my eyes. Ellen, Ellen, Ellen.

Then the Maggot was beside me and pulling me to my feet. He thrust the Scorpion into my right hand and took the belt of ammunition from around my neck. He tossed his M16 away and scooped up the Kalashnikov. “I’ve got to get you out of here, Nick.” He turned me gently towards the sea.

“No.” I jerked myself away, then almost screamed because of the bolt of pain that seared up my left arm. I began walking towards the house.

“Nick!” the Maggot called.

“No!” My left arm was useless, and beginning to throb with a hellish pain. Blood was trickling inside my sleeve to drip off my fingers, but I did not care how much blood I lost or how much the wound hurt, just so long as I could get inside Billingsley’s house where Ellen was. By the light of a flare I could see the dead gunman’s blood spreading in dark wandering tendrils through the swimming pool. “I’m going in there,” I explained to the Maggot and pointed towards the policeman’s house.

“We got the boat’s radio working,” the Maggot said, “so it’s OK! Help’s coming.”

“Sod your help,” I said groggily, then I heard voices shouting from the next-door house, and I turned southward to see three men running towards us across a tennis court that lay between the house and the sea. I tried to raise the Scorpion, but the Maggot was much quicker than me. He used the Kalashnikov to sweep a green hose of fire across the court to drop all three men flat. One man stayed down, while the other two scrambled away. They were shouting for help and, even if I had been minded to take the Maggot’s advice and retreat to the boat, it was now too late because we were cut off from the beach.

“Come on!” I shouted at the Maggot. He ran towards me. I could hear the bullets flicking overhead, then we were both in the shelter of the small courtyard. But we would not be safe for long, for our enemies now knew where we were.

A screen door in Billingsley’s house was open. I stepped over the sill to see, across the room, and beyond an arch that led into a hallway, a sliver of candlelight showing under a door.

Behind me the Maggot’s machine-gun began firing. He had his back towards me and I guessed that the men from the neighbouring house were swarming towards Deacon Billingsley’s terrace. The Maggot hammered them with burst after burst of fire. A grenade exploded, but the Maggot survived for I could hear the Kalashnikov continue to fire in short professional bursts. How did a football player learn that skill?

I walked towards the slit of candlelight. I went under the archway and found myself in a long central hallway. A door to my right banged open, revealing the outer darkness lit by the fire, and also revealing a tall man standing with a sub-machine-gun. I was in deeper shadow and the man did not see me till my Scorpion fired and its bullets lifted him clean up from the doorstep. The Scorpion had a twenty-round magazine and I fired it all, throwing the man back and cutting off his sudden scream of pain. His blood stank in the warm hallway. Women began screaming beyond the door.

“This is not healthy.” The Maggot cannoned off the archway to join me in the hall. I held the Scorpion towards him and he obligingly took out the magazine, reversed it, and thrust the full magazine home.

“Put it on single shot, will you?” I asked him.

“Sure, Nick.” He turned the selector to the ‘1’, so that now the little gun would not empty its magazine in one blinding burst of fire.

“Now open the door.” I nodded towards the telltale strip of light. I could not open the door myself because I was holding the gun in my right hand and my left hand was hanging bloody and useless.

The Maggot put his hand on the door, paused as he wondered what threat waited on the far side, then he threw it open and I dropped to my knee with the gun facing a candlelit room full of screaming and terrified women. “Shut the fuck up!” I shouted, because I was just as terrified as they were.

“Nick!” a girl called in astonishment.

“Shut up, get your heads down! Down! Down! All of you! Down! Down!” I was screaming the order as I crossed the threshold and searched the room for enemies, but there were no gunmen in there, only a group of women who huddled together for protection. I could see two beds in the room which was otherwise as bare and characterless as a hotel bedroom. I could not see Ellen. It was Robin-Anne who had recognised me. The Maggot was still in the hallway. He began firing the Kalashnikov and empty cartridge cases skittered across the polished wooden floor. Outside the windows I could hear a motor running, and I hoped to God it was not the jeep with its half-inch Browning.

“Grenade!” the Maggot shouted in warning, then threw himself backwards into the bedroom as the grenade exploded in the hallway, then the echo of the bomb’s blast was drowned by the rending noise of the Browning half-inch machine-gun opening fire on us. The shutters and glass of the windows literally disintegrated, turned to splinters and sawdust and shards by the heavy bullets that now sawed at the wall of the house, chopping and chewing through it, even destroying the stone pillars at the edges of the windows. The machine-gunner was firing red tracers, and the fire was streaking across our heads to splinter and pierce the inner walls of the house. The Browning was powerful enough to fire clean through bricks and plaster and timber and sheetrock. The girls were screaming and sobbing, though the machine-gunner had fired too high and so far no one had been hit. Flakes of plaster and chips of wood rained down on us and the air was as thick as smoke with dust. The candles flickered in the gloom.

I scrambled over the room and provoked a shriek by treading on a naked pair of legs that belonged to a girl who was lying by an open window. She would not or could not move, so I knelt on her thighs as I pushed a fallen wrecked shutter aside to see the jeep standing no more than ten yards away. The machine-gunner, standing in the jeep’s rear bed, was gritting his teeth as he played the stream of bullets back across the house.

He saw my face appear at the shattered window and he began tugging the Browning’s heavy weight to face me, but I already had the little Scorpion resting on the splintered windowsill. I was sobbing and screaming myself with the pain, but I would be writhing in my death throes if I did not aim calmly and properly.

I fired my first shot and the Scorpion’s recoil felt as feeble as a pop gun.

The Browning’s bullets chopped towards me, filling the night with an appalling violence. I fired again. It was like using a peashooter against a cannon. I should have brought my Webley, I thought, then wondered why I had left it behind. The Browning’s big bullets were destroying the night, splintering a whole world, and all I had was the Scorpion’s puny single-shot power. I squeezed the trigger a third time as the plaster and timber of the wall began to explode in powdered wreckage about my ears, then suddenly the Browning’s scarlet tracer jerked upwards to shatter Deacon Billingsley’s rooftiles into thick red shards.

The gunner had disappeared backwards. The Browning’s awful noise stopped dead and in the sudden silence I heard myself whining in agony.

“Nick?” A girl spoke from underneath me. It was not Robin-Anne’s voice, nor was it Ellen’s. “Nick?” the girl said again.

I ignored her. I was watching the jeep’s driver who had taken cover behind the engine block, and I wanted to make sure that the man did not leap up to take over the now silent machine-gun. Behind me the Maggot fired a brief burst into the hallway, then there was an odd silence, except for the throbbing of the jeep engine, the crackle of flames and the moaning of a wounded man.

“Nick!” The girl underneath me was suddenly insistent, and even offended that I had ignored her so far.

“What the hell is it?” I asked irritably.

“You’re kneeling on my legs, Nick. I really think you should know that you’re hurting me.” It was Donna, who sounded very aggrieved. “Please, Nick! If you could just try to be a little more thoughtful?”

“I’m sorry.” I moved off her legs and wondered if she ever wore anything other than the flimsy bikini.

She smiled drenching forgiveness on me. “Good evening, Nick. And how are you this evening?”

“Donna?” I said blankly. I had recognised her, but I still could not quite come to terms with meeting her thus amidst the dust and smoke of this bullet-torn room.

“I’m good, thank you.” She had assumed I had asked her how she was, which I had not, but nor was she ‘good’ either, for she was very close to hysteria, but Donna had been wonderfully brought up and even amidst the grenades and bullets she was doing her best to remember her Episcopalian manners. I looked back out of the window and saw that the jeep driver was still crouching behind his vehicle, then he suddenly showed his face because he was staring upwards towards a throbbing noise that seemed to fill the whole sky and I saw that the jeep driver was Matthew McIllvanney.

“Did McIllvanney bring you here?” I asked Donna.

“Of course he did!” she said brightly. “That’s Matthew’s job.”

“So what’s he doing here?” I had to shout because the throbbing noise had turned into the percussive blows of helicopters coming lower and lower, and some of the helicopters were equipped with bullhorns through which men were shouting in Spanish and English. They were yelling that we should throw down our guns and stand still. A searchlight sliced down from one of the hovering machines. “What’s McIllvanney doing here?” I asked Donna again.

“He sometimes stays overnight, then tomorrow he’ll take Dominica and me back to Nassau.” She gestured at a tall and very pretty black girl who cowered at the foot of the other bed. “Dominica’s my partner,” Donna explained.

“Your partner?”

“At doubles. We play tennis with Susan and Felicity.” Susan and Felicity evidently formed another part of the pile of lubricity that quivered on the wreckage-littered floor.

“What is this?” I asked. “Bloody Wimbledon?”

“It’s the cabinet minister,” Donna explained primly. “He pays us to play tennis in our altogether while he takes videos of us.” She gave a little laugh of embarrassment. “And I have the most awful backhand,” she confessed, as though the cabinet minister might have noticed.

“You play naked tennis?” I asked in utter bewilderment.

Donna nodded. “Yes, Nick. Though of course we all take care to put on some sun-blocking cream first.”

“Fuck me,” I said, but in astonishment rather than hope, then I stared round the bullet-shattered bedroom. A teddy bear, its stuffing disembowelled by a half-inch Browning bullet, lay close to a wide-eyed Maggot who seemed only just to have noticed the half-naked company he was keeping. Robin-Anne, looking like an orphaned waif among a company of princesses, was scrunched down at the far end of the room. “Have you seen a red-haired girl here?” I asked Donna. “Called Ellen?”

“Oh, no.” Donna did not even need time to think of her answer.

I glanced out of the window. McIllvanney was on his feet, hands in the air. A helicopter’s lights were just above him, and its rotor was thrashing the nearby palm trees and whipping dust up from the ground. “Stay here, John!” I shouted at the Maggot.

I almost screamed as I climbed through the broken window. My left arm hit the wall and the pain was suddenly blinding. Shreds of metallic insect screen and shards of glass caught and ripped my bloodied fatigues, but somehow I managed to get my right foot on the sill, hauled myself through the broken frame, and jumped down to the ground. A blinding searchlight immediately pinned me from the sky. “At this time,” an American voice said, “you are required to stand still.” The men in the helicopters did not know I was a good guy; to them everyone on the ground was a suspect. “Drop your weapon,” the voice ordered me, “put your hands over your head, and stand still.”

“Piss off!” I shouted. They could not have heard me for the metallic voice was now repeating the orders in Spanish. I ignored the helicopter. The Scorpion was in my right hand, blood and dust and plaster sheeted my left arm, and my ribs were hurting. I guessed that by dawn I would have bruises like hoofkicks all over my chest where the flak-jacket had stopped Sweetman’s bullets.

“At this time…” the metallic voice began again in English, and I thought I recognised the flat nasal tones of the DEA agent, Warren Smedley.

I stared up into the blinding vortex of wind, dust and light. “Shut the fuck up, you illiterate freak!”

Amazingly, the illiterate freak shut up, or perhaps the helicopter pilot just moved the machine away towards more open ground, but whatever, I was suddenly left alone. But McIllvanney had also heard my shout, recognised me, and began to run. I ran after him. Ahead of us a helicopter landed and spilt armed men on to the fairway. A light had been set up to illumine the radio mast so that it would not prove a hazard to the aircraft. Everything, I thought, had been so well planned, then I saw McIllvanney jump to take shelter in a sand trap.

“Freeze!” I screamed at him, he looked back, and all he could see was the Scorpion in my right hand, and the sight of the small gun scared him into utter immobility. He stood petrified as I walked through the pelting wind of sand and palm scraps and smoke that was being lashed outwards by the helicopter’s rotors. McIllvanney began shaking his head as I got close to him. “Down!” I shouted.

He dropped into the sand. I slid into the sand trap, then knelt on his belly and rammed the Scorpion hard into his face. “This time it’s loaded,” I shouted at him, “and I’ll rattle bullets round your poxy skull if you don’t tell me the truth. Where’s Ellen?”

Another helicopter landed not far from us, its rotors kicking up a further slew of dust and sand. The bullhorns were bellowing their orders, trying to scare a whole island into quiescence. Blue-uniformed men with helmets, flak-jackets and M16s were jumping from the grounded machines, while yet more helicopters were flying in from the sea; their red, green and white navigation lights showing like bright jewels through the rifts of smoke that hung in skeins above the island.

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know!” McIllvanney shouted. “I don’t focking know!”

“You brought her here!” I was shouting like a maniac, and all around me the air was filled with the noise of engines and the stench of kerosene, and the smoke from the burning house and the sound of men calling orders. “You’re fucking lying!” I rammed the Scorpion’s tiny barrel hard into the soft flesh under McIllvanney’s right eye. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know! For Christ’s sake, I don’t know!” He was terrified. “I didn’t bring her here! On my honour, I didn’t!”

“You lied to me!” I shouted. “You gave me all that garbage about Ned Carraway! All the time you were just wanting to bring Ellen here for these bastards to kill!”

He stared at me with what had to be genuine amazement. “Ned did call me!” he protested. “He couldn’t reach his wife because she was with her parents, so he called me instead because he knew Ellen worked for me! But I haven’t seen her since the day you left with the twins on board Wavebreaker.”

I stared at him. Another helicopter reared back, flared its rotors and thumped down to spill yet more armed Americans on to Murder Cay’s nine-hole golf course, which was beginning to look like Panama City on the day of the American invasion. Slowly I was beginning to see what must have happened. “Is Ellen here?” I asked McIllvanney, but more softly.

“No! They’ve been looking for her, just like they’ve been looking for you.” He was almost crying in his eagerness to convince me of the truth. “They keep asking me where she is, but I don’t focking know! Billingsley wanted to know, because he’s the one who offered me money for a night in bed with her, and Sweetman never lets up about her, and now you’re asking me, and I don’t focking well know where she is! I just don’t know! I’m not a magician! I can’t make the bint appear when I don’t know where she is!”

“She’s not here?” I asked, not because I needed another denial, but rather in sheer astonishment.

“She’s not here!” McIllvanney screamed, and I realised that Sweetman had lied about raping Ellen. He had lied because it had amused him to send me to my grave in abject misery, and he had very nearly succeeded.

McIllvanney had inadvertently spat at me in his desperate efforts to persuade me, but he need not have been so frantic for I believed him anyway. I had been deceived, but not by McIllvanney, and not even by Sweetman—at least, not seriously. The illusions had been made by others. I flinched with pain as I stood up and shuffled away from him. I let the Scorpion drop into the sand. “You can get up now,” I said.

“I’ve got nothing to do with the drugs!” McIllvanney shouted at me. He was still on the ground; still shaking. “You tell them that, Nick! You tell them! I’ve never messed with drugs! You know that! I just bring them girls. And they’re good girls, the best!”

“I know,” I said, then a man yelled at me from the edge of the sand trap to put my hands up, and another uniformed man jumped down to hold an M16 at my stomach while a third man grabbed my wounded left arm and, ignoring my yelps of pain, slapped a plastic handcuff about my bloody wrist then dragged my right hand down and cuffed my wrists together. The invading Americans were immobilising everyone; only later would they divide the black hats from the white hats.

“Don’t move!” one of the invaders shouted at me, then thrust me face down beside McIllvanney who had been similarly cuffed. A vast Chinook thumped down beside a green, then disgorged a jeep which tore up the carefully manicured grass with its spinning wheels.

An American officer paused at the lip of the sand trap to speak into a small hand-held radio. “Stingray Alpha, Stingray Alpha, this is Stingray Dolphin, Stingray Dolphin. All secure in this area. I say again, all secure in this area. Dolphin out.” The man gave McIllvanney and me an incurious glance then walked on.

“I’m not into drugs!” McIllvanney shouted after the officer, who ignored him, so the Ulsterman looked back at me. “Nick! You know me, I hate drugs, so I do! They’re an abomination!” He evidently believed that by convincing me he could convince all the world of his innocence.

But I was not listening to McIllvanney. I was lying with my face in the sand and with agony ripping up my left arm, but I was also suddenly and sublimely happy. The word Stingray had confirmed all my suspicions. The senator had tried to radio Stingray, and now Stingray had come, because Stingray had always been meant to come, and that meant Ellen was safe.

And Ellen had always been safe.

The good guys had her, not the bad guys, but the good guys who had wanted me to help them. It had been the good guys who had caused Ellen to disappear, then encouraged me to take revenge for that disappearance by attacking Murder Cay. The Americans could not have legally searched Murder Cay because the Bahamians would not have given their permission, but the world would forgive the Americans if their forces, conveniently exercising close to the island, responded to an emergency call for help from an American senator who had travelled to Murder Cay on the innocent mission of seeking his missing children; and if the British government complained about such a Grenada-like invasion of the territory of a sovereign and Commonwealth nation, then the Americans would reply that they had also been rescuing the hide of a dumb Britisher who had only been trying to help the senator.

Thus had this whole night been planned. If either of the radios had worked then the cavalry would have ridden to our rescue long before the firefight developed, but the cavalry had always been waiting just beyond the radar horizon. Which all meant that I had been manipulated. The dictates of politics and public relations had decreed that this operation should look like a rescue mission, and my participation took away any suspicion that the operation had been planned in the Pentagon. The senator and I would be depicted as nobly heroic fools; Don Quixotes tilting at real giants and winning.

And the Maggot?

The Maggot, I imagined, would not exist. The Maggot would become invisible because the Maggot was surely an undercover man for either the DEA or the US Customs Service, or one of the myriad Task Forces that the Americans deployed against drugs.

“This one,” I suddenly heard the Maggot’s voice above and behind me, “you can shoot now. He’s only a stray Brit and no one could have any possible use for him.” Then he laughed.

“You bastard,” I said, then the Maggot cut off my plastic cuffs and lifted me with an extraordinary tenderness. He took me to a medic who gave me basic field care, and who wanted to chopper me immediately to the operating theatre of a naval ship, but I refused to leave Murder Cay. I had questions I wanted answered, and to seek those answers I walked along the beach with Maggot. “Who are you?” I asked him.

“Maggovertski, John.” He grinned through his black tangled beard. “Otherwise known as the Maggot. You know who I am, Nick. Failed football player, failing businessman, good old country boy, layabout, average pilot, extraordinarily talented beer drinker, gun collector, lover of loose women, lover of tight women, lover of any women, tennis coach extraordinary…”

“DEA?” I carried on the list for him. “US Customs? Special Task Force? CIA?”

“I kind of go deaf to some questions, Nick, on account of having banged my head against dickhead offensive linemen too often. But considering I’m just an easy-going party-loving animal with an aeroplane and a boat, you’d be amazed how many people confide in me their wishes and plans to introduce strange and narcotic substances into America.”

We walked slowly on through the cloying sand. The small lagoon waves flopped feebly on the beach. The painkiller was making me light-headed, but not foolish any longer. “So where’s Ellen, John?”

“So far as I know, Nick, she’s in an Embassy guest house in Nassau. She’s been well treated, though she didn’t think so. We kind of denied her a telephone, and kept her on a leash, and she was unhappy about that. In fact she was as mad as hell. I know you’re fond of her, Nick, but have you ever caught the rough side of her tongue? Jesus, she could strip the teeth of a running chainsaw! We were only keeping her in Nassau for her own protection, but you’d never have known it from the way she cussed us.”

I smiled. “Were you the one who took her to Nassau?”

“Smedley did. You met Smedley, right? I kind of arranged it, though.” The Maggot had the grace to give me an apologetic look. “Sorry, Nick. But, Jesus, when you telephoned and asked for my help? You were just offering us temptation, and I was always kind of bad at resisting temptation.”

“Screw you, mate,” I said, but without malice, for I liked the Maggot, and he had been clever, so very clever. Instead of flying Ellen direct from Straker’s Cay to Nassau he had taken her to Freeport and allowed her to complete as much of her planned itinerary as possible, thus making it seem even more plausible that she had been kidnapped. “But why couldn’t you have told me the truth?” I asked.

“Think about it, Nick. If you’d known this whole party was being laid on and paid for by the US government, would you have put your miserable hide on the line for us?”

“No,” I confessed wisely and truthfully.

“And you were just too good to overlook,” the Maggot said with an indecent relish. “A trained soldier, and the son of the great Sir Thomas Breakspear! Even the Brits can’t object to us rescuing Sir Tom’s dear son from the narcotraficantes.”

“But why did I have to do the killing?” I cut across his foolery with the bitter question.

He gave me a shrewd glance. “Because you were a marine, Nick.”

“Not in your Navy.”

He walked in silence for a few paces. “It’s a war against drugs, Nick, and we’re not going to win it unless we fight as cruelly and as pitilessly as the narcotraficantes. Not that we thought there’d be any killing here. Damn it, if the senator hadn’t thrown his radio at the bloody dog, no one would have got shot! It wasn’t meant to be like this.”

“It never is,” I said, and I thought that Ellen was right, and that this whole damn crooked business should be brought into the open so that no one could make profits so huge that they were worth the fighting and the dying and the lying and the stealing and the misery.

“Anyway, it’s over now.” The Maggot was uncomfortable with my dismay and hurried the conversation on. “I guess we owe you a big thank you, Nick. Not, of course, that I speak for the US government, you understand. In fact, and you may quote me, the US government is just like any other government; a load of fat-assed faggot lawyers who only understand how to spend people’s taxes but who can’t even piss downwind unless their aides show them how to do it. So I would hate you to spread a rumour that I was in any way associated with those pin-headed dickbrains, and do I make myself plain?”

I smiled. “Yes, Maggot, you do. You don’t exist, am I right?”

“You are so right.”

Dawn was showing like a line of gun-metal above the horizon. The wind was rife with the stench of helicopter fuel, but beyond the coral reefs there would be a cutting cleanness to the air. I suddenly wanted to be away in my boat; just Ellen, Masquerade, and myself in great waters. I looked ruefully at my bandaged arm. “You’ve made it kind of hard for me to mend my boat, you big non-existent bastard.”

“The boat’s going to Florida tomorrow, Nick. You signed the papers, remember?”

I stared up into the Maggot’s strong face. “When was all this set up? After Sea Rat Cay?”

“Sure. But even before that we kind of guessed Rickie might be making a play. It was all his idea to come to the Bahamas, remember? And the senator has been co-operating with the authorities for a few months now. In the first place he thought that by co-operating he could keep his son’s sentence low, and in the second place he reckoned it might just pay off in a big stinking heap of publicity, and publicity to a politician is what cocaine is to Rickie. But I still didn’t know if we were going ahead, even yesterday. We were kind of doing it by the seat of our pants, Nick, and I reckon if the bad guys hadn’t come gunning for you, then my lily-livered lawyer superiors wouldn’t have had the guts to turn us loose.” The Maggot turned to stare back at the houses. The fire had been put out now, but in its place was a patch of brilliant white light that was evidently cast by the sun-guns of some television crews. “The press are already here,” the Maggot explained, “on account that some of them were accidentally invited to watch a night of Operation Stingray.”

“Accidentally invited by the senator?” I asked.

“I do believe his press office was involved. And I do believe that we may just have seen the making of a President.” The Maggot lit a cigarette. “Of course, there’ll be a whole lot more pressmen and television people arriving in a few hours, and they’ll all want to talk to you. One of my jobs is to make sure you say the right things, Nick.”

The helicopters carrying the press had landed on the island’s northern promontory. From there the reporters had been escorted to see the tons of cocaine that had been waiting on the island for shipment to America, then the journalists were offered the senator as the hero of the hour. This would be tonight’s lead television news story; how a senator’s gallant attempt to rescue his children had led to the smashing of a Latin-American cocaine family. Good had triumphed over evil, the white knight had ridden deep into the valley of the shadow of death and had come out smelling of roses and his reward would be the White House rose garden. The politician had found his cause, America would have its illusion and the drugs would still flow in by other routes.

The press were not shown the bodies. One of the dead was Deacon Billingsley. He had been the man who had come to the door in the house and had there been killed by a full magazine from my Scorpion. Now, like the other dead, Billingsley had been zipped into a green rubber bodybag.

The press were not introduced to Rickie or Robin-Anne. Rickie was carried to a helicopter on a stretcher, while Robin-Anne walked beside him, her hand in his. “The rich are different,” the Maggot said sourly as he watched the senator’s two children being gently escorted away.

“How so?”

“Everyone else gets handcuffed and kicked around, but the bloody rich get choppered off to a five-star drug clinic. And doubtless the judge will be told that Rickie helped turn in the Colón family, which means Rickie will only get a light tap on the wrist and told not to be a silly boy again.” The Maggot spat into the sand as the Crowninshield twins were helped up into their helicopter.

The reporters were allowed to see the prisoners being led towards another waiting chopper. The cabinet minister was protesting his innocence, but Warren Smedley, the DEA agent, had already revealed to the press that a half-ton of cocaine had been discovered in the cabinet minister’s house. It was clear that the island’s distinguished hostages, designed to keep the Americans off Murder Cay, had been expected to share the island’s dangers as well as its pleasures. Miguel Colón, stone-faced, was submitting to the plastic manacles with dignity, while Smedley, his captor, was looking like a sourpuss that had found the world’s largest bowl of double cream. He even listened courteously as I passed on McIllvanney’s protestations of innocence. “At this time,” Smedley magnanimously responded, “we are recommending prosecution only against the island’s inhabitants and their paid guards, not against their domestic servants or transient visitors.”

“Not that any of it counts,” the Maggot said to me when Smedley had gone. “The lawyers will have every single prisoner out on bail by this time tomorrow, and we’ll be lucky if we can extradite even one of them.”

The reporters were not introduced to the Maggot, who stayed well clear of their cameras and notebooks. His name would not be mentioned in any newspaper because, officially, he did not exist. Instead he walked unnoticed towards the airstrip where the navigation lights of yet more American helicopters strobed in the day’s first feral light. “It’s time I went,” he told me, then he turned and stared briefly into the far western sky where, dark against the fading stars, a lone helicopter beat its way towards Murder Cay. “I guess you know what to say to the press, Nick?”

“The truth?” I suggested.

“That’s usually dangerous.” The Maggot grinned. “Why not say that only you and the senator came to the island, no one else, and you didn’t bring any guns with you, you took the weapons off some careless guards who crashed their jeep. You’ll see that we’ve tipped the damn jeep over for you, so the story will ring true. You don’t say that the senator was pissing in his jockey shorts, instead you talk convincingly of his noble and self-sacrificing heroism and of his outstanding qualities of leadership. If you can sing a bar or two of ‘Hail to the Chief’, that would help. And, naturally, the two of you only fired in self-defence.”

I smiled. “Naturally.”

The lone helicopter was over the edge of the airstrip now, its landing lights bright on the stunted slash pines and sea-grape. The Maggot was not watching it; instead he was looking towards a small group of civilians who were being escorted by grinning Coastguards towards a big Chinook. “Dear Lord above.” The Maggot’s voice was suddenly hushed into an unnatural reverence. “Do you see what I see, Nick? Is that not pure essence of bimbo?”

I turned to see the group of girls being ushered towards the Chinook, but only one girl in that group could possibly have been a match for the Maggot’s concupiscent dreams. “She’s called Donna,” I told him, “and she’s an Episcopalian from Philadelphia, and she needs a tennis coach to look after her backhand.”

“Nick, don’t tease a friend.”

“It’s true,” I said, “as God is my witness, she’s worried about her backhand. Say you’re a friend of mine, and tell her I said ‘hi’.”

“You are a great and generous man, Nick. And I do believe I have found myself a private pupil.” He gave me an evil grin, then held out his huge hand with its heavy Superbowl ring. “I’ll see you before we die?”

I took his hand, then held on to it to stop him from walking away. “One question, Maggot,” I said.

“Try me.”

I had to raise my voice because of the din being made by the landing helicopter. “The girl in Pittsburgh? Was she a lie too?”

He shook his head. “No, my friend. Wendy is all too goddamned real. She’s why I do this.”

I let go of his hand. “Good luck, Maggot.”

“And to you, my friend!” He began running towards Donna’s Chinook, then paused to shout back at me. “Tell Ellen I’ll be glad to be the best man at your wedding! We’ll have a blast!”

I laughed and turned away. The incoming helicopter had thumped on to the runway and its rotors were slowing to a halt. The drifting dust was touched red-gold by the rising sun. I saw that the first reporters had spilt on to this southern part of the island, and some were now heading towards me. It was time for me to add my corroborating testimony to the senator’s instant legend. George Crowninshield; the winning warrior of the drug war, the senator who dared to act, the man to lead a nation in its crusade against the drugs that had threatened his own children. I could almost see the senator’s halo as he strode about the island with the reporters and at the head of his newly arrived herd of aides and press secretaries.

Then a voice called from behind me and I turned, and I forgot the senator, and I forgot the reporters, and I forgot the Maggot, because Ellen had arrived on the lone helicopter, and her hair was red-gold like the new sun and her beauty brought a lump to my throat as I walked towards her. I held my arms outstretched, and she was running towards me, and I could see tears in her eyes and I knew she was happy, and I was just as happy; then we clumsily met, we clasped, we were laughing, and the embrace skewered a white-hot pain in my arm, but it did not matter.

“They wouldn’t let me come,” she said in breathless explanation, “because they said I might tell the truth to the press people, and I said if they didn’t bring me I’d certainly tell the truth, the whole bloody truth, to the whole damned world, so here I am.” She was laughing and crying. “Are you all right, Nick?”

“I am now,” I said, “I am now.” I heard voices strident behind me, and knew the press were almost on top of us. I kissed Ellen. “I want to make you a promise,” I told her.

“Go on.”

“I will always tell you the truth.”

“Dear Nick,” she said. “Why do you think I’m here?” Her hands were warm in mine. A flash bulb cracked its brightness as she laid her head on my shoulder.

“Mr Breakspear! What happened?” A dozen voices demanded of me.

I turned and stared at the reporters. They were sweating and eager, hounds pressing on their kill. Sun-guns dazzled us, and microphones hedged us about. The journalists shouted insistent questions; demanding to know how I had met the senator, and did my father know I was here, and what had actually happened, and who was the girl with me, and how did I get the injury? But they went silent when I raised a hand. “I shall tell you the truth!” I made the promise in a stentorian voice, the voice of a marine sergeant shouting above the sound of a half-gale thrashing a parade ground, “and I shall tell you nothing but the truth.” The senator had been momentarily forgotten by the press and his face showed pure horror at the prospect of my veracity. One of his newly arrived aides was thrusting through the crush of reporters in an effort to reach and silence me, but I had my audience now and I would not waste it. “Our revels now are ended,” I said, but this time in the glorious voice of Sir Tom himself, the voice the old fraud had employed in his famous production of The Tempest at Stratford in ’79, the voice that one critic had described as being like a golden-throated trumpet calling to the heart of a world’s perplexity. “These our actors,” I went on,As I foretold you, were all spirits, andAre melted into air, into thin air;And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great globe itself,Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolveAnd, like this insubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuffAs dreams are made on—

I stopped abruptly, obedient to Sir Tom’s adage always to leave the little darlings panting for more, and then I bowed, and then I laughed, and then I walked away. Ellen, her arm in my good arm, was laughing with me. The senator looked like a man reprieved from death, but not sure why. The equally puzzled reporters swarmed after me, shouting their questions, but I had nothing more to say. The isle was full of noises, but I had none to add, nor did I care what the world made of me, nor of Ellen, for we were bound for the long seas where high stars would guide us and a good boat would carry us, together and for ever.