The Black Death

Chapter 6

The marine forecasts were right for once, and the good weather held. I fueled at Virginia Beach and headed for Key West with Excalibur still herding me. I worked her once on the CW transceiver, in plaincode, and was told that she would escort me to the eastern end of Cuba and then leave me. From there I presumed she would run up to Guantanamo. Anyway I was going to be on my own in the narrow gut between Cuba and the north coast of Haiti.

Lyda was a pretty sick girl for two days, then she got her sea legs and began to bounce back. A little weak and wan, but showing signs of being the Black Swan again. She evinced no interest in sex for the time being, and that was all right with me. Finally I had to sleep, and trust her, and I did and when I woke up after about 12 hours she had the cruiser on gyro and was sitting there in the chair staring at me. Damned if she didn’t have that big Webley in her hands, both hands, and was pointing it at me and it was shaking a little, up and down and sideways. It was a big heavy gun and she was a nervous girl and I was very, very careful. I spoke softly, gently, and I smiled at her.

“Better think it over,” I said. “You can’t run this cruiser by yourself. And that Coast Guard cutter knows I’m in command and they’ll be checking before they leave us. If I’m not around they’ll take you into custody and you’ll be in real trouble.”

The big revolver wavered as she thrust it at me. “Where’s the money, you bastard?”

“Oh, that!” I tried to sound tres gay, as though the revolver didn’t bother me in the least. “I hid it. Don’t worry about it. It’s safe and you’ll get it back when this is over.”

She looked mean and anxious and doubtful. “You didn’t do anything crazy? Like throwing the money overboard?”

I reached slowly for a pack of cigarettes and she didn’t shoot me and I figured I was over the hump.

“Use your head,” I said. “Do I look like a man who would toss a hundred thousand dollars overboard?”

“More than that,” she said. “Almost a hundred and fifty— and no, I guess you wouldn’t do that. Throw it overboard. But where is it?”

I lit up and blew smoke at the ceiling and said, “I’m not going to tell you that, Lyda. You’ll just have to trust me. I thought that was the whole idea — that we would trust each other. If we don’t, if we can’t, we might as well call this thing off right now. We’ve only got half a prayer now, and if we fight each other we don’t have any chance. Now put down that goddamned cannon and stop being a fool.”

She lowered the revolver but her eyes sparked yellow at me. “That money is all I have in the world. All we have — my people. I’m responsible for it.”

“Wrong,” I said. “I’m responsible for it. It’s invasion money and there is not going to be any invasion, so you don’t need it now. Tell you what I’ll do — just before we go into — Haiti I’ll show you where it is. I won’t give it to you, but I’ll show you where it’s hidden. Okay?”

It wasn’t really okay but she had to accept it. She nodded and dropped the Webley on the carpet beside the chair. “I think I know where it is,” she said sullenly, “but I can’t budge those crates.”

I could understand that. I can lift 300 pounds, and I had I been sweating getting the crates back into the locker in the forepeak.

I picked up the Webley and grinned at her. “Why this blunderbuss, of all the guns we’ve got aboard? You can hardly hold it.”

She shrugged and wouldn’t look at me. “It looked big I enough to kill you and it was already loaded. I–I really don’t know much about guns, Nick.”

I tossed the Webley out a port. Not much loss. “Don’t let your troops find that out,” I said. “A leader is supposed to be able to do anything the troops have to do, and do it better.”

She put her face in her hands and began to cry. I watched the silver tears slide down her light coffee hued cheeks. Nerves. Tension. Seasickness, whatever. I patted her shoulder lightly, offering no sympathy because I knew she didn’t really want it.

“Cry it out,” I said. “And trust me, baby. For both our sakes.”

I went up to the flying bridge and snapped her off gyro and took over the con. To my left, like a black speck on the inside of a blue bowl, the Excalibur was sheep-dogging us.

It was out of my way, but Hawk had said Key West and so Key West it had to be. Anyway I figured to get fuel and water there, taking on enough extra of both to get me to Haiti and back again. Back? I wasn’t counting much on back, but if we did make it I didn’t want to run out of fuel and water somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean. We rounded the tip of Florida and headed for the Key. I was standing a 24-hour radio watch with Excalibur and when I made my westing she was puzzled, some snafu about orders, and she came booming in on the loud speaker to question me.

I explained that I had orders for Key West and after a moment the signal came back to proceed accordingly. Even the signal sounded a little puzzled and disgruntled, and I knew how the commander of the cutter felt — he was working in the dark, on a directive from Washington, and he didn’t know what in hell it was all about.

The Gulf was a mill pond. The weather was holding and it was hot for April. I stripped to the waist, stowing the Luger and the stiletto in a locker, and began to refurbish my tan. Lyda took to wearing very short shorts and a halter. She was in good spirits again and sang as she went about her chores. Just before Key West, while I had the cruiser on gyro, she made a sudden grab for me in the deckhouse and we rolled around on the floor for a time and I got another real working over. It was good and exciting, and I didn’t mind the way she put her teeth into me.

When it was all over and she was satisfied, she was, as always, very cool and all business. By now I had her emotional patterns pretty well figured out and only hoped she didn’t deviate from them when we really got down to business.

I brought Sea Witch in at the foot of Duval Street. Instead of docking I rigged a make-do anchor and took the dinghy in. Not wanting to tempt Lyda more than necessary, I took the keys with me and, just to make doubly sure, a couple of vital doo-dads from the engines. Lyda watched this with a sardonic smile.

“Mutual trust, huh?” Her smile was white and sour. “It doesn’t seem to work both ways, does it?”

I kissed her on the mouth and patted her fanny. “I do trust you,” I lied. “But I have to follow orders or I get my ass in a sling. Orders are to take absolutely no chances.”

“Hah.”

I held her away from me and grinned. “Anyway, if your heart is pure, and you don’t intend any monkey business, what does it matter?”

As I shoved away in the dinghy I said, “Stay off the deck all you can. Keep out of sight. The Key is full of Cuban refugees and God knows who else — maybe some of the Tonton Macoute. We don’t want you spotted.”

She gave me a little wave and headed for the deckhouse, almost running. All I ever had to do was mention the Tonton Macoute and she got scared. There was something more to that than I understood at present.

I didn’t know who I was looking for. The deal was that an AXE agent would contact me when I came ashore from Sea Witch. I snubbed the dinghy and climbed a ladder. I was wearing the green dungarees and a white tee shirt and the yachting cap and I hoped I looked like any other part time, small craft, sailor.

I was not prepared for the old man, but there he was in person. Hawk. He had on a wrinkled seersucker suit and a white shirt with a sweaty collar and a horrible tie. He had a new Panama cocked on his gray head at what he probably considered a rakish angle.

He came up to me and extended his hand and growled at me: “Hello, son. Nice to see you. You look like a pirate.”

I grinned at him. He was dry smoking one of his cheap cigars and he looked like a farmer come to town to see the sights.

I said: “Everybody tells me that, sir.”

He dropped my hand and squinted at me in the hot hard sun. “Yeah. I suppose. Come on. We haven’t got much time. I have to get back to Washington right away, and we have a lot of ground to cover. Things have come up — a lot of things.”

I fell into step with him. “Must be,” I said. “For you to come down here in person.”

The old man nodded grimly. “It’s hot and getting hotter all the time. Just to clue you in I’ll say that this could be as rough as the Cuban missile crisis.”

I whistled softly. “Devious. Very devious. I thought all I had to do was go in and snatch this Valdez out of Papa Doc’s teeth.”

“That too,” Hawk said. “That too — but a lot more.”

He led me to a Chevy hardtop and handed me the keys. ““You drive. And you can relax — I’ve got three men covering us just in case. Probably a waste, because I think the Tonton Macoute have lost you and the girl for now.”

“Leave us pray,” I said.

He glanced out over the Gulf to where the Excalibur was just visible, then flashed his false teeth at me in a grim little smile. “How are you and your escort getting along?”

“Just fine. Only the skipper doesn’t seem to know what it’s all about.”

Hawk laughed curtly. “He doesn’t. This was a hurry-up job — I had to jump channels and go direct to The Man.”

I started the Chevy. “Where to?”

“Just drive. I’ll tell you.”

I watched the mirror as I pulled out into traffic. A Ford with two men in it pulled out from the curb and followed us. As I approached a stop light a red MG gunned out of a parking lot and cut in front of me.

I glanced at Hawk. “I feel so safe, boss. You’ll spoil me with all this security, you know. I might get used to it.”

He made a sour grimace. “Don’t. You’ll be on your own soon enough. Take that next side street.”

We did a little futzing around while Hawk watched the mirror. Following his directions I drove the Chevy past the Ernest Hemingway museum and across Truman Avenue to skirt Garrison Bight. A lot of the charter boats were in. We circled and cut back past the old turtle kraals and eventually ended up in front of a private house on Greene Street. Hawk told me to pull into the drive. The red MG turned a corner ahead of us and stopped. The Ford stopped half a block behind us.

Hawk was grumbling. “A lot of goddamned nonsense but I have to do it. I don’t think there’s a goon within seven hundred miles of here. Come on, Nick.”

It was a little over seven hundred miles to Haiti.

Just to put the spurs in him a little I said, “That’s what the skipper of the Pueblo thought about the North Koreans.”

He just grunted and didn’t answer me.

Hawk unlocked the door and we went into a big, cool, dusty-smelling livingroom. All the shades were down and the draperies drawn. Hawk took a sheaf of onion skin paper from his inside pocket and tossed it to me. It was closely typed, single space, and there were maybe twenty pages.

“Read it,” he said. “Not now. At your leisure on the way to Haiti. Then destroy it. How is the subject doing?”

I said she was doing okay and gave him a fast and succinct rundown on events since the shoot out at the voodoo church. He kept nodding and gumming his cigar and didn’t interrupt.

When I finished he said: “Watch her every minute. I think she and the HIUS are on the level about wanting this Dr. Valdez out, but on the other hand they may want him in. We know they want him as the next President of Haiti. The mulattos, that is. The elite. They want their land back, their cane and coffee plantations, and to do that they have to kill Papa Doc and replace him with this Valdez. He’s a mulatto too, you know.”

I hadn’t known and said so. Hawk waved a hand.

“No matter. What does it matter that Dr. Valdez is also a physicist. Theoretical, but still a physicist. At least he was at Columbia, before Papa Doc snatched him, and I don’t suppose he has forgotten much in five years. That mean anything to you, Nick?”

It did. “It begins to sound a little familiar and ugly,” I said.

“It is. You remember those Sidewinder rockets that were stolen recently in Bonn? That were supposed to have been shipped to Moscow?”

I said I remembered.

Hawk stuck a new cigar in his mouth. “They never got to Moscow. They were stolen again, enroute, and ended up in Haiti. The CIA lucked into that bit of information. The Coast Guard picked up a Cuban refugee not long ago. He was a member of Cuban Intelligence and he was pretty well shot up when they took him aboard a cutter. Before he died he convinced the CIA boys that Papa Doc has got missiles, modeled after the Sidewinder, and that he is trying to develop atomic warheads for them. Castro knows this and is about to go nuts. You see it?”

I saw it. If Papa Doc had missiles, and if he could arm them with nuclear warheads he was going to dominate the Caribbean. Every little banana republic was going to dance to his tune.

And Dr. Romera Valdez was a physicist. No wonder that Papa Doc refused to ransom him for the million the HIUS had raised. Lyda was right about that.

“Valdez was a Commie when he was at Columbia,” Hawk said. “The FBI and CIA have a file on him from here to there. He was never an activist, only a parlor pink, but he was a Commie. We don’t really want him back in the States.”

I watched him carefully “You really want him dead?”

Hawk shook his head. “Only in extremis, son. That’s what The Man says. You’re not to kill him unless there is absolutely no hope of getting him out.” He frowned and spat a piece of cigar on the floor. “I wouldn’t do it that way but that is the way The Man wants it, and I have to take orders the same as anybody. But we can’t let Papa Doc keep him.”

I lit a cigarette. “How much of this, of what we know, do you think Lyda Bonaventure knows?”

The old man shook his head. “I can only guess. In all her dealings with the CIA she played it very close to the vest. They were trying to mulct each other, she and the CIA contacts, and I’m damned if I know who came out ahead. You’ll have to find out from her the best way you can.”

“She’s all for getting Valdez out,” I said. “Or so she tells me. And she must know he’s a physicist and a Commie.”

Hawk nodded. “Yes. She will know that. She also knows just where in Haiti Valdez is being kept prisoner. Don’t let her con you that she doesn’t. She can take you straight to him. You know she is the Black Swan?”

“I know.” I had told him about the arms and the uniforms and how I had a BG on my hands.

“She’s probably got a pretty good underground organization in Haiti,” Hawk said. “She was planning on using the blacks for the rank and file of her invasion Army. She only has a small hardcore of mulattos.”

“Why would the blacks go for that? Once the mulattos are back in power the blacks will be worse off than they are under Duvalier.”

“They don’t know that yet,” Hawk said. “Things are so bad under Papa Doc that the blacks are ready to try anything. By the time they wake up it will be too late. If she can bring off an invasion.”

“She’s not going to bring off any invasion,” I promised [him. “She’s cute and clever, all right, but she isn’t that good. I’ve got her in control. Forget the invasion.”

Hawk sighed and leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “All right, son. I trust you on that. But you still have to get to Valdez, get him out of Haiti or kill him, and let us know the stage of progress Papa Doc has achieved with his missiles and atomic warheads. The last thing in the world that The Man wants to do is to have to occupy Haiti again. They hate us enough as it is, we’ve still got the stink of the Dominican thing hanging over us, and right now is a poor time for trouble in the Caribbean. Any time is a poor time, but right now it would be murder. We’ve got enough on our plate with the Mid-East and Vietnam. You’ve got to do us a job in there, boy, and you won’t have any help. The CIA is blown to hell and I’ve got one agent left in Port-au-Prince. One man! I would like to keep him. But if things go badly and you’re running for your life, and can get to Port-au-Prince, he might be able to help.”

He told me how to contact the man in Port-au-Prince. He went on to talk for another quarter of an hour, really socking it to me, and I listened and felt worse by the minute. What I really needed was a regiment of Marines — real tough Marines like those who had occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. I didn’t have any Marines. I had only me. As I drove the Chevy back to Duval Street Hawk told me about the New York thing.

“The CIA is plenty teed off about losing Steve Bennett, but they’re covering. The New York cops don’t know what’s going on, but they smell a rat and their Homicide people aren’t trying too hard. That third goon got away clean and the other two are dead.”

“I knew I got one for sure,” I said. “I couldn’t be sure about the other one.”

“DOA,” said Hawk. “He didn’t talk in the ambulance.”

Hawk didn’t go out on the pier with me. We shook hands and he said, “Study the precis carefully, son. There is a lot more to this than I had time for. Be sure you destroy it.”

“Will do. Goodbye, sir.”

He flipped his gnarled old hand at me. “Goodbye, Nick. Luck. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”

As I rowed the dinghy back to Sea Witch I could only hope that his waiting would not be in vain. That he would hear from me.