The Black Death

Chapter 7

I ran through the old Bahama Channel, keeping well clear of Cuban waters. In fact I made so much northing that as I turned south to enter the Windward Passage I could make out the dim smudge of Matthew Town astern.

The Excalibur, like a faithful dog taught to heel, was running to port of me and a couple of miles back. As soon as I got into the Passage she came boiling up to circle in front of me and signal:

Leaving you now — rendezvous per instructions on call— goodbye and good luck—

I had a lonely and chilly feeling in my gut as I watched her churn away. Her officers and men were watching us through glasses and, feeling as alone as I did, I couldn’t help but chuckle. A day out of Key West Lyda had taken to going topless. She wanted sun on her breasts, she said, and to hell with a bunch of peeping Toms.

“You’re an exhibitionist,” I told her, “and you are driving a lot of nice clean American boys off their rockers. Onanism is frowned on in the Coast Guard and you are encouraging it. In this case going without a bra is probably treason.”

She couldn’t have cared less and said so. I didn’t give a damn myself and I had to laugh every time I thought of what the officers and men of the cutter must be thinking. Especially the skipper. He knew, without knowing the details, that I was on a serious mission, and it must have shocked his staunch old soul to watch us playboying around on Sea Witch. I wondered if he would put it in the log, or include it in his report to Washington, and what the expression on j Hawk’s face would be like when he read the report.

Lyda came to stand beside me now and we watched the I cutter disappear over the horizon. She stood behind me, her breasts just touching my bare flesh and nuzzling my ear with her moist lips. We had become quite fond of each other by J this time.

The Excalibur was out of sight.

“She’ll run into Guantanamo,” I said. “Give the crew a little leave, take on some supplies, then come back here to cruise on station. I just hope to Christ we see her again.”

“Amen,” said Lyda. She gave me a sharp, excited look of conspiracy and I could almost hear her boiling inside. We were about to get down to the nitty gritty, and she was happy and ready.

In the west the sun was falling fast and lavishing color on the Passage. Lavender and gold and crimson and blue purple. An occasional flying fish skittered in a sparkle of silver. The sea was calm, running in long, shallow, green troughs crested with lace, and the tradewind from Africa was sweeping steadily and moistly cool in our faces. No other craft was in sight and, with night about to come, that suited me fine. From here on it was going to be very tricky.

I smacked her taut behind and told her to go fix dinner. Then I throttled the engines, keeping bare way on her, and snapped on the gyro. I now had a number of problems.

I had read and memorized the precis Hawk gave me, then destroyed it. It was a headache, nothing but more work and more trouble and more danger, but that couldn’t be helped. It also added considerably to the cast of characters— something I could have done without — for this soup already had too many cooks fooling around with it. I had read about Paul Penton Trevelyn, and seen an occasional rare and outdated picture of him, but now I might have to meet this weird character in the flesh. I might even have to kill him.

P.P. Trevelyn, as he was usually called, was an eccentric billionaire who made his permanent home in Haiti. Hawk admitted, in the precis, that AXE didn’t have a hell of a lot on P.P., and what they did have was out of date and not very reliable. P.P. was a mystery man, a recluse and a rabid Fascist, and he and Papa Doc were as thick as the thieves they undoubtedly were. P.P. made Howard Hughes look like a raving extrovert and had more money then Getty. The most recent picture of him was twenty years old.

P.P. was also the head of Papa Doc’s intelligence service, and put up the money for it. It was P.P. who was holding Dr. Romera Valdez on his huge estate near the ruins of Sans Souci palace and not far from The Citadel. It was my guess, and that of the CIA and AXE, that Mr. Trevelyn was calling a lot of Papa Doc’s tunes.

Lyda thought so, too, and she admitted that it was going to be tough to get Valdez out of P.P.’s clutches. The man had a private army! That made two armies I would be up against — Papa Doc’s and P.P’s.

I was still brooding over this when she called me to come and eat. I tossed my cigarette overboard and took a last look around. The sun was gone, and the colors faded, but in the quiet immensity of the sea gloaming there was a quality of peace and serenity that gripped and held me, the more because I knew it might be a long time before I had the feeling again. If ever. This was going to be a rough one and I felt distinctly uneasy.

After dinner I told Lyda to get out all our charts and notes and make them ready for a last council of war. I went topside and cut the engines and put an already rigged sea anchor on Sea Witch. It was fully dark now, with just a sliver of moon in the east. We had this stretch of the Passage to ourselves and I didn’t turn on any running lights. After a last check around I made my way through a clutter of lashed oil and water jerricans and back down to the deckhouse. Lyda had slipped into her halter and a light sweater, against the slight chill, and was poring over the charts and a clipped sheaf of notes.

I lit cigarettes for both of us and squinted through smoke at the charts. “All right,” I said. “Let’s get on with this. I want to run into Tortuga tonight and hide before it gets light. You got anybody on that island?”

She nodded and frowned down at the chart, wetting her lips with a long pink tongue. “A few people, yes. If nothing has happened.”

“You can get in touch with them without danger to us?"

I watched her closely. We had been together long enough for me to know when she was lying, or even thinking about lying. Now I frowned at her. “You would have heard, wouldn’t you, if anything had happened? You are the Black Swan, the boss lady.”

She nodded, but gave me a tart look. “I mean recently, Nick. In New York I would have heard, yes, but we’ve been a little out of touch the past few days, yes?”

She had a point there. Except for working Excalibur a couple of times I had maintained strict radio silence, and there hadn’t been any broadcasts from Port-au-Prince to indicate trouble. We had been monitoring Radio Haiti constantly. That didn’t mean a damned thing, of course. Papa Doc is a very secretive man.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll have to chance it. Are there many people on Tortuga?” It was an island off the northern coast of Haiti, about 20 miles from Port de Paix on the mainland, and an old private hangout.

“Not many. Some fishermen and a few blacks. There isn’t much there.”

“A place we can hide the boat and camouflage her?”

She nodded. “No trouble there. A lot of coves and inlets. You’re worried about air patrols?”

I was sure as hell worried about air patrols and I said so. Papa Doc didn’t have much of an air force, but I didn’t have any, and it only takes one plane to spot a boat that shouldn’t be there.

Then she brought up an old, and sore, subject. We had argued about it all the way from Key West.

“If you would only let me use the radio, Nick! I could call my people on the mainland and it would be so much easier than doing it the way you want to. I—”

“No, goddamn it!” I slapped the table hard with my palm. Amateurs get on my nerves at times.

“It would make it easier,” I went on. “Easier for Papa Doc and this P.P. Trevelyn. How do I know how many DF sets and monitoring stations they’ve got? Transmitting to the mainland is asking for it, Lyda. They’d get a fix on us and that would be it. End of story. End of us. And don’t bring that up again!”

“Yes, Captain. I won’t.” Her smile had the familiar mockery in it.

“We stick to my original plan,” I said. “We lie in Tortuga while you make a contact and send him to your people on the mainland. Verbal only. No notes. Your messenger will set up the rendezvous on the mainland for tonight. That is the way it is going to be.”

“Of course, Nick.”

“Another thing,” I went on, “I don’t want any of your friends coming aboard Sea Witch. If they try it I’ll have to shoot them. Get that straight, Lyda. Because I’ll do it, and if the gunfire starts too soon we’re cooked. We might as well send Papa Doc a telegram.”

She saw the sense in that and agreed, unsmiling. “I know. I don’t especially want the blacks to know what we’ve got aboard — since there is to be no invasion. They — they might get ideas of their own.”

I couldn’t resist sneering a little. During the last few days of sharing boat and bed we had reached that free and easy, comfortable, stage where we did not mind sharp tongues or fear to hurt each other’s feelings.

I said: “The blacks bug you a little, don’t they? You’ve got to use them, because there aren’t enough of you brown people, but you don’t trust them. I see your point — you mulattos make the revolution, then the blacks step in and take over and hang you along with Papa Doc.”

Lyda shrugged. “If I were invading I would worry about that, but since there is to be no invasion it doesn’t signify. Forget the invasion, Nick. You have my promise not to try any tricks.”

I figured that the promise was worth about a half a Haitian gourde. A dime.

She put her finger on the chart, then picked up a pencil and made a mark. “Just here, on the northwest coast of Tortuga, there is an inlet and a little river. Only a creek, really, but it should be deep enough for Sea Witch.”

“No problem. We’ve got a depth finder. We can nose her in slowly, as far as she will go. A little risky, but we’ll have to take that chance.”

I was worried about getting hung up on a bar.

She pushed the pencil into her thick hair and smiled at me. “It should be all right. The last time I was here I was on a boat that draws more than we do, and we didn’t have any trouble. Once we’re into the creek mouth we can lie against the side and the palm trees will hide us.”

I watched her eyes. “When was that? The last time you were here?”

“About three months ago. I told you that once. I come and go in Haiti whenever I please.”

She had told me, come to think of it.

I said: “You were setting up an invasion even then?”

Her dark eyes were candid and cool. “I was. I knew even then that Duvalier wasn’t going to ransom Dr. Valdez, that he was only playing us along.”

I nodded. “Good. Then we do it the way we planned. We use your invasion people, and the invasion route, but without the invasion. What are you going to tell your people? We have to use them without them knowing they are being used.”

Lyda frowned at me and wet her lips. “I know. That could be a little tricky, even dangerous. I might have to lie a little.”

I grinned at her. “No problem for you, kid.”

She ignored that and said, “I can handle it, Nick. I’ll tell, them that this is a last reconnaissance before the actual invasion. But I’ll have to make up a story to explain you.”

I put on a tee shirt and the fatigue jacket and checked the Luger and the stiletto. I strapped on the web belt with the .45 Colt snug in its old worn holster.

“Tell them anything you like,” I said. “Just be sure that I know what you tell them. Okay. That’s it for now. I’ll get her underway. I want to be in that creek and hidden before the sun comes up.”

At the companionway leading up to the deckhouse I glanced back at her. “Wear your fatigues and the cap, if you want, but leave off your star. And find yourself a weapon — a hand gun that you can handle. A light gun. If you can’t handle it I’ll give you a couple of lessons.”

I went back to the engines and started them in neutral. I hauled in the sea anchor that was holding Sea Witch into the wind. As I got under way again, running without lights, I wondered if I was being smart — using her invasion setup for my own purposes. I shrugged. It was better than going ashore and floundering around in the jungle with no contacts at all. I just had to watch her every second, even closer than I had been doing. See that she didn’t kill me, or have me killed, and then stage her invasion anyway.

When the sun came up and gilded the one low mountain on Tortuga — the chart said 1240 altitude—Sea Witch lay snug in the creek under a thick canopy of coco palms with plenty of water under her. Lyda, so excited that she was jittery, got ready to go ashore and find her people. She was wearing the green fatigues and cap, without the brigadier’s star, and she carried a little Smith and Wesson .32 and some spare cartridges in a belt pouch. I would have bet she had a knife on her somewhere. I couldn’t see it and I didn’t ask her.

Just before she went ashore I told her, “Stay out of trouble. If I hear gunfire I’ll wait ten minutes, no more, then m run for it. You got that? Ten minutes.”

She laughed and pressed herself against me and gave me a wet kiss, sticking her tongue in my mouth. She writhed against me, and she was so excited and hotted up that she wouldn’t have minded taking a quickie right there on the deck. I pushed her away, tempted as I was.

“Get going. Come back as soon as you can. Make a little noise when you come back and whistle before you get too close. I’d hate to kill you by accident And don’t bring anyone back with you.”

She gave me a smile and a snappy little salute and dropped over the side. The creek ran so deep here that I had been able to snub the boat right into the bank. A moment later she vanished into a thicket of wild cane. I listened and I couldn’t hear a thing. I marked that. She moved in the thick growth like a ghost.

The funny thing was that I missed her. I had grown accustomed to this lovely, slim wench. I made a pot of coffee, spiked it with a shot of booze, and then went forward. I selected three of the most modern machine guns from our arsenal, pawed through a crate until I found the right ammo, then took the guns back and laid them out on the deck close to hand. There are always a million things to do on a boat and now I kept busy so the time would go faster and I wouldn’t get nervous.

After an hour or so it began to rain, big bullet-sized drops spattering silver on the deck. I took my guns and went in the deckhouse.

Noon came and no sign of her. The rain stopped and the sun came back and the jungle began to steam. I monkeyed around with the engines. From the stern I could see down the creek and across the cove to open sea, and once a coastal sloop boat beat across the inlet under full sail. A snatch of Creole song reached me, and then the sloop was gone.

I sat with my legs dangling over the side, a machine gun in my lap, and watched parrots flutter in a tangle of wild orchids. A big lizard came to the bank and eyed me, decided he didn’t think much of me, and went slithering off.

The drums started. Somewhere to the south and east, a deep vibrating basso, a nervous and irregular dum-dum-dum? dum. After five minutes or so the first drum stopped and another one picked up the beat. They talked for half an hour, back and forth, then hushed abruptly.

A long green snake with yellow markings came sliding past the boat. I eyed him and made a little sound and he stopped and arched his head to peer at me.

“The natives are restless today,” I told the snake. “Beat it.”

It began to rain again. By three o’clock it was still raining, and I was as nervous as a whore in church. Where in hell was she?

At ten after three I heard the pistol shot. It sounded like the .32, a light whip of sound from not far off. I snapped the safety off the machine gun and ran for the shelter of the deckhouse. I crouched out of sight and laid the muzzle of the gun across a port ledge and waited.

Dead silence. That one shot had hushed everything in the underbrush. Not even a bird moved. I peered into the scrub growth and the wild cane and I couldn’t see a damned thing.

She whistled in Morse as we had arranged. Two shorts, two longs, two shorts. Ditty-dum-dum-ditty. Question mark. Everything okay?

I whistled back a K. Long, short, long. Dah-de-dah. Come on in.

She came out of the cane and walked toward the boat. There was an odd, tight look about her and she was carrying the .32 in her right hand. I went to meet her with the machine gun cradled across my left forearm and my finger on the trigger.

She made a little sign and said, “It’s all right now. I killed him.”

I gave her a hand and swung her aboard. “You killed who?”

She was sweating a little, silver beads popping out of her tan skin. Her stare was grim. “One of my own people. Or so I thought until a few minutes ago. He disobeyed orders and followed me when I started back here. Strictly against my orders, Nick! I wasn’t sure at first, but he was clumsy and I kept hearing him behind me and I set a trap and he walked into it.”

I nodded. “What did he say when you jumped him?”

Lyda gave me a very odd look. “Say? He didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask him anything. I just shot him. His name was Tomaso — one of the blacks.”

“You’re sure he’s dead?”

She nodded. “I’m sure. I checked that.” She let out a deep shuddering breath and sat down abruptly on the deck. “Now that it’s over I’m not so sure. Maybe he was just curious. Nosey. He would know that I wasn’t alone.”

“And maybe he was working for Papa Doc,” I said. “Forget it. You did the right thing. Just so you’re absolutely sure that he’s dead.”

“Right between the eyes at ten feet,” she said coldly. “I told you. He’s dead.”

I accepted that. I was a little worried about the shot but there was nothing I could do about it. We had to stay where we were until dark.

“Give me a cigarette,” Lyda said, “and get me a drink. I need it.”

I did and also brought the maps out on the deck. When she got the drink down and had a couple of puffs I said, “All right. What’s the score?”

The drink had helped her. Her hands stopped trembling and she smiled at me and said, “Everything is all right so far. A man, one of the fishermen, is on his way to the mainland to set it up for tonight. Here, I’ll show you on the map.”

She took my pencil, studied the map for a moment, then made a small black X halfway between Port de Paix and Cap Haitien.

“We go ashore here. Somebody will be waiting for us. The coast is desolate, rain forest and jungle — there’s not a road for miles — and it’s only about 25 miles inland to Sans Souci and P.P. Trevelyn’s estates. There are a few villages, but the only town of any size is Limbe and we can swing around that and come in from the west. There is another town, Milot, to the east of Sans Souci, and Papa Doc has a lot of troops in there.”

I studied the light pencil tracings on the map. “There’s a main highway just beyond this town? Milot.”

“Yes. My people tell me it is heavily patrolled just now. Troops and Tonton Macoute all over the place.”

When she said Tonton Macoute she stopped and looked at me and I saw the terror in her eyes as I had seen it before. It was as good a time as any.

I said: “What is it with you and the Tonton Macoute, Lyda? I know they’re rough and miserable bastards, but why do they scare you so? You don’t seem to be frightened of much else, but the Tonton have got the sign on you. How come?”

For maybe thirty seconds she didn’t answer. She didn’t look at me. Then, in a whisper that I could barely hear, she K said, “They raped me when I was a little girl. I was fifteen. It was just after Papa Doc came to power — the Tonton Macoute came to arrest us one night. We were brown, mulattos, and we owned a lot of land and we lived well and they hated us. They wanted our land and our house.

“That night they beat my father up and hauled him off to prison. He died a week later. They made my mother watch while six of them raped me on the floor of the living room. Later, a whole lot later, I got away from them and left Haiti for the States. I had some American friends and they managed it for me. I took my mother with me and she died insane in Bellevue. I–I hadn’t any money for a private hospital. I hadn’t any money at all.”

She was crying softly, remembering. I kept silent. This was the first time she had ever really let her hair down about her personal life and I wanted to hear it. How I wanted to hear it! The more I knew about what made her tick the better chance I had of staying alive and bringing the mission off.

Lyda wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her jacket and kept talking. For once I felt that she was telling the absolute and I exact truth.

“There were quite a few Haitians in the States. Mulattos and blacks, all running from Papa Doc. Most of them were poor and they weren’t organized. There were two little ghettos — might as well call them that — one in Brooklyn and one on the west side up close to Columbia. We were in the States on sufferance and we were poor and we did menial jobs and got by the best we could. I was lucky. I was working as a waitress in a bar at 113th Street, and one night Dr. Valdez came in with some friends. He heard me speaking to another waitress and knew at once that I was Haitian. He didn’t say much that night, but a few days later he came back to the bar, alone, and we got to be friends.”

“Did you know that Valdez was a Communist?”

She was doodling on the edge of the chart with a pencil. She bared her teeth at me and gave a snorting laugh. “Communist? Hah I Romera Valdez was an innocent, a political innocent! My Christ, he was naive. He could even see some good things about Papa Doc. Romera was a parlor Commie, a fellow traveler that didn’t know what it was all about, a gentle man that hated to swat a fly. He used to make me so furious that I wanted to kill him, the way he always wanted to turn the other cheek.”

I had her talking and I didn’t want to break the spell, but I had to ask the question. “Were you in love with Valdez?”

She nodded quickly, and for a moment quicksilver glinted in her eyes again. She found a handkerchief and dabbed.

“I was mad about him. We went to bed for the first time on my 17th birthday and I lived with him for three years. I kissed the ground he walked on. He was a father and a brother and a lover all in one. A husband, too, though we couldn’t get married. His wife is still alive, somewhere in France, and he’s a Catholic.”

I lit another cigarette and kept quiet. She hadn’t finished. There was more and I wanted to hear it.

“Romera got a little apartment for me, on 115th Street near the Drive, and I entered Columbia. I had been to school in Paris and Switzerland — I was home on vacation when the Tonton Macoute came that night — and I passed a special examination and Columbia admitted me. Romera was a full professor by then and whenever we met on the campus we had to pretend to be strangers. I didn’t have him for any classes, of course — he was far too advanced for me and he only taught graduate students.”

Lyda finished her drink and held out the glass. “A little more, Nick darling. Then I think I’ll sleep for a while.”

When I came back with the drink she was stretched on the deck with her eyes closed and the sun on her face, her big soft breasts moving rhythmically up and down. For a moment I thought she was asleep, but she held out her hand for the drink and gulped it eagerly. Then she began to talk again.

“It was fun for a time, sneaking around like that I was only a kid, and it was mysterious and intriguing to pass Romera on the campus, me with an arm full of books, and just give him a cold little nod and keep going. All the time laughing inside and thinking of what we had done in bed the night before. We saw each other nearly every night and on weekends, though we had to be very careful. Then five years ago it happened. Five years this June. The week before my graduation.”

She was silent for a long time. I didn’t push her. I picked up one of the machine guns and went forward. The creek ran silent and deep and deserted and birds flashed brightly in the wild cane and my friend the lizard had brought a buddy with him to see the strangers. Things looked and sounded right in the jungle and after a minute I went back to the girl and squatted with the machine gun across my knees. The sun was lowering to the west and the palm trees were reflected in tall dark shadows striping the boat.

“I hadn’t seen Romera for a week,” Lyda said. “He hadn’t come to the apartment, or called, and whenever I called at his place or his office he was out. Or no one answered. I was worried sick and I was afraid — afraid that it was all over, that he was tired of me. But I had too much pride to go to his apartment, or his office on the campus, and confront him. I just suffered for a week.

“Then one afternoon I saw him on the campus. I had just come back from renting my cap and gown for graduation and I was on Broadway and he was coming out of a bookstore on the corner of 116th and Broadway. I waved at him and shouted — making a perfect fool of myself — and started to run toward him. I suppose I was a hundred feet or so from him. He turned to look at me and he seemed startled— then he swung away from me and crossed 116th and went down to the subway. Walking very fast. I still remember that, how fast he walked, as though he didn’t want to see me or talk to me. I stopped on the corner and watched him disappear and my knees were trembling and I thought my heart would stop beating.”

Lyda smiled faintly and looked at me with half-narrowed eyes. “That’s how young I was, Nick. Romera was my first love, the first man I had ever taken with consent. I thought the world had ended.

“It had ended, the world I had known until then, but that I didn’t grasp until later. I went back to my little apartment and locked myself in and cried. I suffered. I didn’t eat anything for two days, and I drank rum and got drunk and sick, and I played all the records we had enjoyed together, and I was really miserable. On the third day I had courage enough to call him at his office. This time he answered.”

She turned away from me and stretched her lithe brown body and buried her face in her arms. “Jesus God — when I think of it now! I must have terrified the poor man and made him sick, too. I cried and I begged and I even think I threatened him — said I would tell the whole campus, the newspapers, the world, about our affair. Anyway he promised to come and see me that evening. I can remember his exact words — he didn’t sound at all like himself, tense and hoarse and nervous — and he said that he had been ill with a virus.”

Something flickered in my brain, a microsecond of intuition that flared out before I could grasp it, a shadow with no substance to account for it, a pinprick without pain or blood that vanishes as it begins. A fourth generation computer would have caught and pinned it. I couldn’t.

Yet I asked, “Exactly what did he say?”

“He said, ‘You’re acting like a child, Lyda, and you mustn’t. Everything is all right. I have been ill and working hard, and I’ve been worried about something. Something you don’t know about. Nothing to do with you. But I’ll come tonight and we’ll talk it all out and get matters straightened around. I’ll be there at nine sharp. Be sure you’re alone. I don’t feel like seeing anyone else but you.’ ”

I flipped my butt overboard. I said I was a bit skeptical.

“You remember all that? Exactly? Verbatim? After five years?”

She nodded without looking at me. “I do. Just as he said it. Every word. He never arrived at my place, because they took him that night, and I think that fixed the words in my mind. Later I understood what he was worried about, and why he had been staying away from me. Romera had been writing a series of articles against Papa Doc, for the New York Times, and he didn’t want to involve me. I think he had a premonition that the Tonton Macoute would get him. But he must have expected them to murder him, not kidnap him and smuggle him back to Haiti.”

I kicked it around in my mind for a couple of minutes. On the surface it appeared logical enough, to make sense, yet something was missing. But there was nothing to come to grips with and I brushed it off.

Lyda said: “I waited and waited. He never came. Somewhere between his apartment — he had a place near Barnard— and my place they got him. It must have been easy. Romera was such an innocent. He didn’t even know how to protect himself.”

Yes, I thought. It would have been easy. A man walking down busy, crowded upper Broadway on a limpid June night. A car pulling over to the curb and a couple of goons leaping out and grabbing him and shoving him into the car. It would have been smoothly and efficiently done. Once he was in the car it was all over. They had probably taken him straight to some banana tramp at a pier in Brooklyn or Staten Island.

The sun had gone and the short purple twilight of the sub-tropics fell like a gauzy net over Sea Witch. Lyda Bonaventure lay with her eyes closed, breathing deeply, half between sleep and waking, and I knew she was through talking. No matter. I knew the rest of the story. Most of it was in the AXE files and some I had picked up from Steve Bennett, the CIA man who had been killed in the voodoo church.

I picked her up and carried her into the deckhouse and put her on the divan. I patted her cheek. “Catch a little nap, kid Not for long, because we’re taking off as soon as it’s dark.”

I stowed the two extra machine guns in the deckhouse and took the third with me when I went forward to make up our packs. I didn’t want to show a light and I had to hurry. The dusky light seeping in the ports was already clotting into darkness.

I rigged two surplus Army packs, and two musette bags, and prepared two web belts with canteens and mess kits and a couple of Swiss tool-knives and compasses. All this junk was helter-skelter in one big crate and as I sorted it out I picked up the story of Dr. Romera Valdez where Lyda had dropped it.

There had been one hell of a stink about it in the papers. The Times especially, for which Valdez had been doing the articles, had played it big. Both in the news columns and on the editorial page. Net result — a big zero. Papa Doc sat tight and denied everything, or ignored it, and after two or three weeks the story petered out. Nobody came forward. Nobody had seen Valdez abducted. Nobody had seen anything. He had stepped into a manhole and disappeared down a bottomless canyon.

Not quite. The FBI went to work on it — we had their stuff in our files — and found that a small tramp steamer, a vintage rustpot, had left Staten Island the morning after Valdez’ disappearance. She was La Paloma, registered in Panama. The CIA, when they took over, traced her ownership to Haiti and that was where the trail stopped. Ostensibly La Paloma was owned by the Bank of Haiti. Papa Doc.

There wasn’t a damned thing the United States could do about it. Valdez had never become an American citizen. It took the CIA a year to find out that he was being held in the dungeons under the palace. That was all they could find out — that Valdez was alive and apparently well treated. Now, according to AXE files, this P.P. Trevelyn had him somewhere on his estates near Sans Souci. That figured, if Valdez was working on atomic warheads for the missiles Papa Doc was supposed to have. They would need space and privacy, something you couldn’t get in Port-au-Prince.

I filled another musette bag with ammo and carried the lot back to the deckhouse. I had enough ammo for a small war, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it. I also had a dozen each of gas, smoke, and fragmentation grenades. I was tempted to take one of the recoilless rifles and a mortar, then I laughed at myself and forgot it. We would be laden enough as it was and we had to travel fast and far.

I wakened Lyda, and we ran out of the cove without lights and turned into the channel between Tortuga and the mainland. She squatted in the cockpit and read the chart by the light of the instrument board. We were into it now, in Haitian waters and past the point of no return, and if one of Papa Doc’s patrols spotted us it was all over.

As we ran past the eastern point of Tortuga Lyda watched the compass. “Another ten miles and we turn south. That will put us about 15 miles off the coast and our rendezvous point.”

I had Sea Witch throttled down, purring along, and I translated miles into knots and when the time came I arced her into a long turn to the south and then cut her speed to a creeping five knots. There was no moon and it was clouding up to rain. The night was cool, even chilly, but I was sweating a little. When Lyda wanted to smoke I forbade it. I had hooded the instrument board.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” I said. “You’re sure this old dock isn’t watched? Seems to me that Papa Doc would keep a special guard on a place like that — he isn’t stupid, you know.”

We were headed for a lonely spot on the coast where the U.S. Fruit Company had once maintained a dock and a cluster of buildings. The place was long disused and falling into ruins, and Lyda swore that she had used it several times to enter Haiti and had never encountered trouble.

She laughed softly, with a hint of the old mockery. “What’s the matter, darling? You sound like you’re nervous in the service.”

“Being nervous has kept me alive a long time,” I said. This kid was ready to go to war. This slim brown girl who had been crying not long before.

“That’s the beauty of it,” she went on. “The place is so damned obvious that Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoute overlook it. It never occurs to them that anybody would dare to use it. So we use it. Clever, yes?”

“Luck. I hope it holds.”

We were running slowly for the coast, rolling a little in the current setting through the gut. I glanced at my watch and said, “Better get your flashlight now and go forward. If everything is okay we should be seeing their signal within half an hour.”

She leaned to kiss me. Her breath was hot and sweet and smelled of booze. She patted my arm. “I’ve got a good feeling about this. Everything is going to be all right, Nick. Just be sure you remember your new name and don’t goof it I sold them a real bill of goods on you and it wasn’t easy. Duppy is as smart as they come, and he is going to be very unhappy that I’ve postponed the invasion again. But I can handle him as long as you don’t cross me up.”

No use telling her how many roles I had played in my years with AXE.

“I won’t cross you up,” I said. “Get forward. Be sure their signal is right. Exactly right!”

She laughed again and went off humming to herself.

My new name was Sam Fletcher. I was using it because I knew the real Sam Fletcher was in Africa fighting for the Biafrans. If he was still alive. Fletcher was one of the last of the old style soldiers of fortune. Though at times he fought for money he was not strictly a mercenary; when he believed in something he would fight gratis and even spend his own money. He did odd jobs for AXE from time to time, which made it easy to keep tabs on him. I didn’t think Sam would mind me using his name.

Lyda had told me a little about this Duppy we were going to meet. In Haitian dialect, in voodoo jargon, duppy means spirit or ghost. A man may die, but sometimes his duppy has the power to come back from the grave. Sometimes the duppy does not even go, but remains on earth and actually; takes the dead man’s place.

Duppy was a nom de guerre, of course. Lyda would not tell me his right name, even if she knew it. “The blacks call i him Duppy,” she had explained, “because of the way he moves in the jungles and mountains. Like a ghost. They say that you never hear him, or know he’s coming — you just look up and suddenly there he is. They’re all afraid of him, the blacks.”

Then she laughed and added, “That’s odd, in a way. Duppy is one of the blackest blacks I’ve ever seen.”

I throttled down still more until Sea Witch was creeping. I barely had way on her. My bearing was due south and somewhere off in that gloom was the coast of Haiti. I snapped her over on gyro and went to the rail and peered forward. I had put a “box” on the flashlight so it couldn’t be seen from the sides, only from dead ahead, and as I leaned over the rail and strained into the darkness I wondered if Lyda was signaling yet. That was one of the hazards. We had to signal first. Our engines were well muffled and, when throttled down, gave off a bare whisper of sound. We couldn’t count on the shore party hearing us.

There it was. A pin prick of white light from the shore. It flitted brilliant in the night, swift and questioning… — . Question mark. Who?

The light vanished and though I couldn’t see Lyda’s signal I knew she was sending:….—.-.- SWAN. I hoped she was getting it right. I had made her practice it enough.

She must have because in a couple of seconds the shore light came back with a — .-. K, okay, come in. Then blackness I again.

Lyda came running back from the bow, tense and choked with excitement. “It’s all right, Nick! They’re waiting for us.”

I switched off the gyro and motioned her to the wheel. “I know. I saw. Here, you take the con until I get up on the fly bridge. I can’t take her in to that dock from down here. Just hold her steady for a minute.”

Lyda had given me an exact description of the dock I was making for. It had been built for ocean going vessels, and it rammed a long, now decaying, finger out from a deep scallop of cove. It had the usual piles and stringers, but for some reason it had been covered on the sides, like an old-fashioned covered bridge. Lyda insisted that we could run Sea Witch in under the dock and it would be like hiding in a long wooden tunnel. We could forget camouflage.

I wasn’t so sure. And I was worried about ripping off the fly bridge as we went in.

I called softly down to her. “Okay. I’ve got her. Go forward and con me in. Keep your voice down.”

I notched her down almost to stop and listened to the soft burble of the engines as she inched along. Ahead of me it was like the inside of a tar barrel. Good in a way, because if I couldn’t see neither could Papa Doc’s coast patrols.

I was wearing the Luger in the belt holster and the stiletto in the sheath on my right forearm. My sweater and jacket covered both. Outside I had the Colt .45 strapped on, and I cozened a machine gun in my lap as I peered and waited for the guide lights.

They flicked into life, dim, sallow, barely seen. One on each side of the open end of the dock. All I had to do was put Sea Witch squarely between them.

It wasn’t easy. I had almost no way on her and the rudder was slow to answer. The current ran fast in so close to shore and the trade breeze, pushing me from the east, didn’t help much. Sea Witch kept falling off to starboard.

Lyda’s voice came whispering back to me. “To the left, Nick. Left. LEFT!”

I had to goose the engines a little to get her back to port. When I throttled down again she was shoving her bow squarely between the lights. They went off. I shoved her into reverse for a second, then cut the engines and ducked and reached up with a hand to feel for clearance, if any. My fingers brushed the splintery underside of the dock boarding. I had six inches of clearance.

A trap door opened in the dock just over my head and a white shaft of light blazed down at me. A deep voice, speaking in Haitian Creole, said, “Bon jou, Blanc.”

Hello, white man.

I shifted the machine gun so he couldn’t miss seeing it, but kept my finger away from the trigger assembly. “Who are you?”

Deep rumble of laughter. He thrust his head into the hole, so the light was masked, and turned the flashlight on his face.

“I’m Duppy, blanc. You the man Swan tell us about? The Sam Fletcher man?”

I nodded. “I’m Fletcher.”

I didn’t give myself away. I’ve had too much practice for that. But the moment I saw that broad, shining black face, that expanse of white gap-toothed smile, I knew who Duppy was. We had his picture in the AXE files. Every AXE man spends a lot of time going through those files and memorizing and I do my homework as well as any.

The picture showed him as a younger man, and with hair — his head was shaven now — but it was the same man.

His real name was Diaz Ortega and he was a Cuban. He had once held a high rank in Cuban Intelligence, when he and Che Guevara had been buddy-buddy. Now Che was dead and Ortega would have been dead too if he hadn’t run for it in time. Castro had found out that Ortega was really KGB, working for the Kremlin, keeping an eye on the Cubans.

The black man extended a massive hand down to me. “Come on, blanc. Fletcher. We got no time to lose, man.”

I ignored the hand and said that I had things to do first. I had to make Sea Witch fast, string fenders so she wouldn’t rub a hole in her planking, and get our gear ashore. I would be along presently.

We were whispering in the dark. “I got men to do all that, Fletcher. We got no time for it.”

“I’ll take time,” I said. “And I’ll do it. I don’t want anybody coming aboard. Swan doesn’t either. She must have told you that?”

“Where Swan?”

“Right here, Duppy! How are you, you big monster?”

Lyda squeezed past me, reaching for my hand and pressing it as she did so. Her lips brushed my ear as she breathed: “Let me handle him.”

I gave her an assist up through the trapdoor in the dock. They whispered and I heard the sound of a kiss. Duppy growled deep in his throat, like an animal, and I caught some of it.

“This Fletcher man… boss already… who he think… I…”

Discord already. Not a happy omen. I shook it away and made Sea Witch fast. I hung out the fenders. Then I remembered and cursed myself and went back to rig the lines again because I hadn’t allowed for the fall of the tide. We had come in at high tide, purposely, and I damned near goofed it I told myself to get with it, Carter, and take things as they came. One at a time. Don’t rush matters. Sooner or later I would find out what Diaz Ortega, a Kremlin man, was doing in Haiti trying to promote the Black Swan’s invasion.

Until then I had to keep my mouth shut and play my cards close to my vest and stay alive. I had to get Romera Valdez out or kill him. I had to check on the missiles and atomic warheads Papa Doc was supposed to have. I had to watch Lyda Bonaventure and see that she didn’t stage an invasion. I had to — oh, the hell with it, I thought as I collected all the gear and lugged it up to the fly bridge. One of Hawk’s coarse jokes, when he is overwhelmed with work, is that he is “as busy as a one-legged man at an ass-kicking!”

One thing I decided as I crawled up through the trap door. When, and if, I got back I was sure as hell going to ask for a raise. I don’t mind work, and I don’t mind danger, but of late it had been getting a little much.

I pulled the gear up through the trapdoor and flung it on the deck. I made out the moving shadows of men around me and there was a lot of whispering. No sign of Lyda and Duppy.

One of the shadows spoke to me. “Swan and Duppy go to shore, blanc. Say you come now.”

It had begun to rain, the wind blowing a fine mist into my face. The shadows around me were silent and I heard drums working far inland. One of the shadows was fitting the trap door into place. Two other figures, dimly seen, picked up the packs and musette bags and walked off down the old dock. I for owed them.

Beside me a voice said, “Watch for holes, blanc. Dock very old and rotten. This for sure a break leg place.”

I was lugging Lyda’s machine gun as well as my own. I slogged along, silent, dogged by the shadow. I tried to repress thoughts about Diaz Ortega. In time. First things first.

The man beside me said, low voiced, “Swan say no invasion this time, blanc. How is this come? We ready for invade for long time now, hang Papa Doc to tall tree. How come this, blanc?”

I said that I didn’t know either. I worked for Swan and I took orders the same as anyone else. Ask Swan, not me.

I heard him spit. Then he made a sucking, sighing sound and said, “I think we wait too long. Something big going on now for sure, blanc. Lots of troops and Tonton Macoute around now. They shoot a lot of people, hang some, and burn many huts and villages. I hear tell all people got to get off land for many miles. You know why that, blanc?”

I said I didn’t know. I didn’t either, but I could make an educated guess. If Papa Doc was clearing the land for miles around then he had a good use for that land. He wanted it for something. Something urgent.

Like a missile range?