The Sentries

11

“You’re dead!” he shouted.

“I am not!”

“I got you!”

“You didn’t get nothing!” she answered. “And I don’t want to play this stupid game.” She threw the toy rifle onto the ground, and he stood in the center of the road staring at it, his lips pursed, a look of utter exasperation on his face.

“What do you have to throw the gun down for?” he asked.

“Because it’s stupid.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re stupid,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“And the beach is stupid,” she said and giggled.

“What do you want to play, if you don’t want to play this?”

“I want to play stupid,” she said.

“How do you play stupid?”

“You just be stupid,” she said and shrugged, and giggled.

She was five years old, and he was six, and he stared at her with the eternal patience of older brothers everywhere in the world, wondering why he always had to go out and play with her after he got home from school each day, and all day Sundays. Her nose was running and her underpants were falling down, and she stood in the middle of the road just a few feet behind the rifle she had thrown down, and he looked at the rifle and then at her and thought, Boy.

“Well, what do you want to do?” he said. He was always asking her what she wanted to do, it seemed. She was just a snotty-nosed little kid, but she was the one who always decided what they were going to do. Boy, he couldn’t figure that one out.

“Let’s play Sunday,” she said.

“What’s Sunday?”

“Sunday is you put on your hat and go for a walk.”

“I don’t have a hat.”

“You put on a make-believe hat.”

“What for?”

“So we can take a walk.”

“I don’t want to take a walk.”

“Why not?”

“What was wrong with what we were playing?” he asked.

“You always shoot me,” she said.

“You can shoot me, too, you know.”

“I don’t want to shoot my own brother.”

“I’m not supposed to be your brother.”

“You are my brother.”

“I mean, in the game.”

“Put on your hat,” she said. “We’ll take a walk. Come on.”

He picked up the rifle and looked at her patiently, waiting for her to relent. She stared at him unperturbed, and then tugged at the elastic waistband of her panties, and then wiped the back of her hand across her running nose. They stood in the center of the road, staring at each other.

“Come on,” she coaxed.

“Well, I’ll go for a walk, but I’m not gonna put on no stupid hat.”

“To play Sunday, you have to put on a hat.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Papa always does. When him and Mama go for a walk, he always puts on a hat.”

“Oh, all right,” he said, “I’ll put on a damn hat.” He went through an elaborate pretense of putting an imaginary hat on his head.

“That’s very nice,” she said.

“Stop wiping your nose with your hand,” he told her.

“Come on.”

They walked up the center of the road. He held one of the toy rifles in each hand. She walked beside him, trying to keep up with his longer stride.

“What we are,” he said, “is Arabs in the middle of the Sumara Desert.”

“Where’s that?”

“Someplace, I don’t know. We don’t have any water. The camels are all dead.”

“You’re playing something else,” she said. “You’re not playing Sunday.”

“I am, too.”

“Then why are there dead camels?”

They walked for a while in silence. The water close inshore was clogged with mud and grass.

“What we are,” he said, “is the first people to land on Mars.”

“We are the first people to land on Mars!” she shouted. A spoonbill preening in the tall grass squawked at the sound of her voice. She turned to the bird and giggled, and then shouted again, “We are the first people to land on Mars!”

“You don’t even know where Mars is,” he said.

“Sure I do.”

“Where is it?”

“Someplace,” she said.

“In the desert?”

“No.”

“Then where?”

“I know,” she said.

“In the water?”

“No.”

“In the sky?”

“Of course not.”

“Ha!” he said. “It is too in the sky!”

“Ha-ha,” she said, “the moon is in the sky.”

“So’s Mars. Ask anybody.”

“There’s nobody to ask,” she said. “Show it to me. If it’s in the sky, show it to me.”

“You can’t see it. You need a telescope.”

“Make believe we have one.” She put her clenched fist to her ear and said, “Hello, this is Cynthia Griffin, let me talk to Mars bars,” and then giggled.

“It’s not Mars bars,” he said. She was still giggling. “And it’s not a telephone, it’s a telescope. It has a thing you look through.” He made his thumb and forefinger into a circle and peered through it.

“Let me see, too,” she said, and immediately pulled his hand to her eye. “Ah-ha!” she said. “Ah-ha! I see it!”

“What do you see?” he asked her, thinking there were times when she was okay, times when he almost liked her.

“I see Mars,” she said.

“How does it look?”

“It has grass and water and mud.”

“Do you see any people?”

“No. Only us.”

“We must be the only ones on the planet,” he said. “Do you see any sign of our ship?”

“What ship?”

“The rocket ship.”

“Yes,” she said, “I see a sign of the ship.”

“Where is it?”

“In the mud.”

“What does it look like?”

“It has a red light on top.”

“That’s probably the escape hatch,” he said.

“No, it’s a red light,” she answered.

“Are you sure it’s our ship?”

She suddenly pulled her eye away from his hand and looked up at him. “Jackie,” she said, “will you get mad at me?”

“What is it?”

“I can’t see our ship,” she said. “All I can see is Mr. Hogan’s car sticking out of the mud.”

Willy had driven Ginny’s car past the barricade and onto S-811, stopping at the diner to get out and identify himself to Johnny and Mac behind the closed Venetian blinds. He knew just where he wanted to take the woman, and he figured the only one who could possibly stop him was Goody Moore, who was stationed in the phone booth outside the marina office. There was a slight parting of two of the blind slats. A pair of fingers showed in the opening, wiggled themselves at him, and then disappeared. He waved at the blinds, got in behind the wheel again, and set the car in motion.

“Who’s in there?” Ginny asked.

“Couple of hungry truck drivers,” he said, and chuckled at his own humor.

“Are you holding up the diner?” she said. “Is that it?”

“Now, do I look like a holdup man?” he said, and grinned at her.

“Yeah,” she answered, “you do.”

There was something odd about this one. He had never met a woman like this one before. He could scarcely sit still beside her. He couldn’t understand this because she wasn’t all that pretty, except for her legs maybe, and besides she was old enough to be his mother. In fact, he wondered why he was bothering with her at all when there was good young stuff right down the beach in the Stern house, waiting for his pleasure. Harry had told him to get back down there, hadn’t he? Hadn’t Goody told him to get back down there? All he had to do was meander into the house and tell Flack to take a walk or something and then go right over to that bed and have his pleasure with her, that was all. Only thing was that this one, this Ginny McNeil here in the car with him, she looked at him kind of funny. Well, she looked at him like she admired the way he carried himself, you know? Or admired what he was saying or doing, you know? Like she tried hard to make believe she didn’t want him saying the things he kept saying to her, or looking at her legs that way, but he could tell she really did want him to. This was going to be something, he just knew it. And this was part of what it was all about, wasn’t it? Wasn’t this part of what Jason had meant when he’d told them about the greater glory, all that stuff? Wasn’t this what he’d meant, didn’t some of it come down to picking up a woman with a fine set of legs and taking her someplace where you could have your pleasure with her?

He took his right hand off the wheel and dropped it onto her thigh. She didn’t move. She just kept looking through the window on her side of the car as if he hadn’t put his hand on her leg at all. But he could tell she knew it was there. He could feel a trembling in her leg and in her body, like a high-tension wire singing in the wind, a high thin hum of excitement running through her and touching his fingers and setting his hand to shaking so that he had to grip her harder. Right then she said, “Where are you taking me?” and reached down and picked up his hand as if it was a dead fish or something bad-smelling, and dropped it on the seat between them so that he had to laugh out loud.

He didn’t answer. He pulled into the driveway to the left of the bait and tackle shop, glancing up the road to see if the phone booth could be seen from here, but it couldn’t. He nodded, pleased. That meant he couldn’t be seen from the phone booth either. He yanked up the parking brake and cut the engine, and then put one knee up on the seat so that it accidentally on purpose was against her thigh, and he said, “We’re gonna get out of the car now, Ginny.”

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“We’re gonna go around back of the shop here, and to the other side where there’s a door. You know where I mean?”

“You mean where Bobby lives?”

“Where the old wino lives, that’s right.”

“Do you know him?” she said.

“Why sure, we’re old buddies,” he said, and chuckled. “You know you got the damn’est legs I’ve ever seen?”

“Yeah,” she said, and moved slightly away from him, closer to the door on her side.

“Now, when we get around to the other side of the shack here, we’ve got to be real careful,” Willy said. “There’s a phone booth just outside the marina office — oh, maybe two hundred yards up the road, you know where I mean?”

“Yes,” she said.

“There’s somebody in that booth, and I don’t want him to see us.”

“Why not?”

“Well, honey, he’d just spoil the party if he did, that’s all.”

“What party?”

“The party you and me are gonna have.”

“Don’t count on it,” Ginny said.

“Honey,” he answered, “I could get rich counting on it.” He paused, and grinned, and then repeated, “Rich.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Come on.”

They got out of the car and walked over the packed gravel in the driveway to the rear of the shack, and then around it parallel to the ocean. He stopped at the corner of the shack and peeked around it toward the phone booth two hundred yards away. Goody Moore was sitting there, just like he was supposed to be, waiting for them five-minute-apart calls from every house on the beach; there was such a thing as carrying things too far, Willy thought. He kept watching the booth, wondering how he could get the woman around the side of the shack and into the room without Goody seeing her. He held her tightly by the wrist. He could feel a pulse beating there. He was sure the old wino had a bed in his room.

Goody was reaching into his shirt pocket for a cigarette.

“As soon as he starts to light that cigarette,” Willy whispered, “you go, you hear me?”

“All right,” she said.

“Get right inside there just as fast as you can.”

“All right,” she said.

“I’m gonna do you fine, baby,” he said. He looked over toward the phone booth. Goody had put the cigarette between his lips. He took a book of matches from his pocket, struck one, and ducked his head to the flame.

“Go,” Willy whispered.

He supposed she could have run away from him right then, but he knew she wouldn’t, or at least was hoping she wouldn’t. She did just what he’d told her to do. She ran as fast as she could around the side of the shack, and then opened the door and ducked inside, and closed the door again, all before Goody had got his cigarette going and shaken out the match.

He had to wait five minutes more for his next opportunity, and that didn’t come until somebody in khakis (it looked like Clay Prentiss; he couldn’t be sure because he’d come up to the booth from the marina side) stopped to pass the time of day with Goody. Willy just sauntered out from around behind the shack with the rifle in his right hand, and walked to the door and opened it, and went into the room, and closed the door behind him, and then turned.

She was on the bed waiting for him.

She had taken off the white work dress and the flat-soled white shoes and the torn stockings. She was on the bed wearing only a white slip. Her face was turned to the wall. Her back was to the door. She did not turn to look at him.

He put the rifle down inside the door and went to the bed and sat on the edge of it, and said in a very soft voice, “Hey. Ain’t you even gonna turn around to make sure it’s me?”

“I know it’s you,” she said. Her voice was muffled.

He put his hand on her backside, just resting it there, not moving it. “How do you know it’s me?” he said.

Without turning, her voice still muffled, she said, “Are you going to kill me?”

“No, honey,” he said. “I’m gonna love you.”

She rolled toward him suddenly, the slip riding back over her knees. She looked up into his face and then she said, “I have the feeling...”

“What feeling do you have, baby?” he said. His hands were moving on her thighs now, sliding over the nylon, gathering the nylon, bunching the nylon up over her thighs, pushing the slip up and away from her long white legs, “What feeling do you have, sugar?”

“That... kill me or love me... it’s the same with you.”

He eased her onto the pillow gently. The room stank of booze and staleness. Later, they would drink. He wanted to drink with her. He could see Ava Gardner’s picture tacked to the white wall. He wondered what it was like to lay a movie star. She had taken off everything under the slip. He moved the slip high up on her thighs and looked at her and then touched her, and she moved toward him wet and waiting and gave a small moan and said, “Honey, honey.” He let down the straps of the slip. He kissed her breasts, and felt her hands on him and opened his eyes and saw Ava Gardner’s picture again. He remembered suddenly that he had killed a man early this morning.

It ended for him in the next moment.

All of it, all the promised excitement of it, all the anticipated pleasure of working together with men who knew what they were doing, who had a definite scheme in mind and who were not afraid of its proper execution, all of it ended for him the moment he entered her because it was then that he ceased caring about Jason Trench or his plan, then that he knew the plan had been executed long ago, this morning when he had shot Stern. This, this now with a long-legged woman in a bed stinking of sweat and booze, this now was the reward to which he was entitled. This was where he wanted to be for the rest of the day. The hell with phase two of the operation out there on the water someplace. The hell with phase three, the hell with all of it but this woman spreading her legs under him. This woman — “Honey, honey, do it to me, give it to me, do it, do it” — was the honor and the glory and the pride and the spoils of a war without trumpets and banners. He romped upon her with a glee almost childish. He could remember running across a field of tall grass holding a little girl by the hand. He could remember clouds unfolding on the brow of a hill. He could remember his mother wearing a white dress and tucking a handkerchief into the cleft of her bosom. Secret after secret seemed perched upon the edge of definition as he moved inside this yielding woman, imploring, entreating, questioning, searching.

He came before he learned any of the answers.

“I’m gonna keep you here all day,” he whispered.

“All right,” she said.

“Even after they’re gone,” he said.

“All right.”

“Gonna keep you here forever.”

There had been twelve outside calls to the marina office so far that morning and afternoon. When the phone rang for the thirteenth time, Benny lifted it from the cradle and said, “Costigan’s Marina, good afternoon.”

“Who’s this?” the voice on the other end asked.

“Benny.”

“Benny who?”

“Benny Prager.”

“Where’s Luke?”

“Taking care of the boats, sir. Who’s this, please?”

“This is Joel Dodge, up Ramrod way.”

“Yes, Mr. Dodge?”

“I was wondering how it is down there,” Dodge said. “They keep yelling about a hurricane, but it looks fine here.”

“It’s fine here too, Mr. Dodge.”

“What’s Luke doing about the boats?”

“Well, sir, he moved some of them into the cove this morning, when he wasn’t sure. But we’re just leaving the rest where they are for now. He asked me to come in, and a few other fellows from Marathon, just in case he needs help moving them later on. I mean, if the hurricane should really start heading this way.”

“Then the boats are okay, huh? My boat’s okay?”

“Which one is that, sir?”

“The white Chris-Craft. Thirty-four-foot Constellation.”

“Oh, yes, sir.”

“You think I ought to drive down anyway? Just in case?”

“I wouldn’t advise it, sir,” Benny said. “Not unless you’d planned to use the boat today.”

“No, I hadn’t,” Dodge said.

“Then we’ve got everything under control here. Appreciate your offering help, though.”

“Well, I was just...” Dodge began, and then paused. “Long as everything’s okay.”

“Everything’s fine, sir.”

“Okay, thank you. Give my regards to Luke when he comes back in, will you? Tell him I called.”

“I certainly will, sir.”

“Thanks,” Dodge said, and hung up.

Benny put the phone back onto its cradle and turned to the other man in the office. “All they’re worried about is their boats,” he said, “each and every one of them.” He shook his head. “Come tomorrow morning, they’ll have a little bit more to worry about, huh?” He grinned. “Just a little bit more, I’d say.”

The seven drunks pulled up to the end of the marina’s pier at thirteen minutes past two. Jason, who had been watching the cutter through binoculars, barely had time to unstrap his automatic and throw it under some canvas on the nearest boat. The seven drunks were aboard a fifty-foot cruiser with twin Cadillacs, and they pulled the yacht into the pier as though anxious to carry half the pier away with them.

“Ahoy there!” the drunk at the wheel yelled down from the command bridge.

“Ahoy!” Jason answered.

“Ahoy!” the drunk shouted, and then burst out laughing. “We are in need of fuel.”

“I can let you have some gas,” Jason said.

“Are you Mr. Costigan?”

“No,” Jason said. “I work for him.”

“I do not wish to deal with menials,” the drunk said, and laughed. “And besides I do not wish gasoline.”

“You said you wanted fuel, sir.”

“Freddy, tie us up to this mangy dock while this fellow runs to fetch Mr. Costigan.”

“Mr. Costigan is busy right now,” Jason said.

“You tell him Horace Carmody needs fuel and he had better unbusy himself right away.”

“I can fill you up, Mr. Carmody, same as Mr. Costigan could.”

Freddy and another drunk had stumbled ashore and were fumbling with the lines, trying to tie up alongside the Diesel pump at the pier’s end. The other drunks aboard kept calling encouragement to the staggering pair while Horace Carmody on the command bridge put his hands on his hips and looked up at the sign and said, “Welcome to Costigan’s Marina! This is some auspittish welcome after traveling all the way from Bimini! You go get Mr. Costigan, young man, and tell him to get right down here to this pier right away. Something funny going on here, all right, when he doesn’t even want to come down to say hello to Horace Carmody.”

Jason had no idea who Horace Carmody was, except that he was a noisy drunk who said he wanted fuel but who also said he did not want fuel. Jason was expecting a signal from the cutter at any moment. Once that signal came, the next phase of the plan would be put into motion. He did not want Horace Carmody and his six drunken cronies cluttering up the waterfront with a yacht, not when an operation of this size was about to get under way. The two drunks on the dock had finally managed to get lines secured fore and aft, and one of the other drunks threw over some press lines while Carmody looked down from the bridge at Jason.

“What kind of fuel did you have in mind?” Jason asked pleasantly.

“Scotch,” Carmody said, and laughed. “Gin,” he said, and laughed again.

“Bourbon,” one of the other drunks shouted.

“Canadian!” another drunk yelled.

“You fellows must be having quite a little party,” Jason said pleasantly.

“Yes, sir, quite a little party, and none of your business to boot. You go get Mr. Costigan and tell him we would like a case of Scotch and a case of bourbon and a case of gin and a case of martinis.”

One of the drunks on the dock began laughing and almost fell into the water.

“We don’t carry liquor, sir,” Jason said politely. He was considering an alternate plan of action if he could not peaceably get rid of Carmody and his party. He would jump down into the boat where he’d thrown his .45, pick it up, and then escort Carmody and his drunken pals back to the repair shop at gunpoint.

“You are supposed to carry liquor,” Carmody said.

“Sir—”

“You are supposed to carry liquor.”

“I’m sorry, but—”

“There is a Coast Guard cutter out on the water there,” Carmody said, pointing vaguely out to sea with an over-the-shoulder gesture. “I shall report you to them if you refuse to serve us.”

“Mr. Carmody, I’m not refusing to serve you. We don’t carry liquor, sir, that’s all.”

“You do carry liquor. Every marina in the United States of America carries liquor. That is the American way. It is the American way to carry liquor in all marinas!”

The drunks on the boat began applauding, and Carmody bowed from the waist and then turned again to Jason. He was a rotund little man wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt patterned with flags and pennants of the international code. A dead cigar stub was clamped between his lips. He smelled of whiskey, or perhaps the stench of alcohol was simply something that permeated the entire yacht, rising on the air like a giant cloud of poison gas.

“Well?” he said.

“Sir—”

“There was whiskey in the marina at Barbados.”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“There was whiskey in the marina at Jamaica. B.W.I. British West Indies. There was whiskey on abundance there. In.”

“Mr. Carmody—”

“And there was whiskey in the marina at Bimini, our last port of call. So don’t try to hoodwink me into believing there is no whiskey here at Mr. Costigan’s fine marina, with his big welcome sign overhead! How can you possibly welcome anyone to your shores without a glass of cheer, eh? Would you mind telling me that?”

“We can give you gasoline and food, if you like,” Jason said patiently. “We’ve got a Coke machine outside the office, a telephone booth if you want to make any calls, and a john if you want to use it. We don’t carry whiskey. I suggest, sir, that you try some of the bigger marinas on the way down to Key West.”

“I am not on the way down to Key West,” Carmody said. “I am on the way to Miami from Bimini.”

“Well, I think you took a wrong turn back there someplace, sir,” Jason said.

“Horace Carmody does not take wrong turns.”

“No, sir.”

“Damn right.”

“When you pull out,” Jason said, “I suggest you come around to the east and follow the coastline up to the bridge at Long Key. You can catch the Intercoastal Waterway up there.”

“I’m not interested in catching the Intercoastal Waterway,” Carmody said.

“I just thought you might like the quickest way to Miami,” Jason said.

“You’re beginning to get on my nerves, young man,” Carmody said. “Please get Mr. Costigan at once. At. Once.”

Jason looked at him a moment longer, and then sighed. He glanced out toward the horizon where the cutter was clearly visible, the Chris-Craft alongside it. He didn’t want Carmody around when the boats began moving. He again debated reaching for the .45. But what kind of insane havoc could seven drunks cause in the repair shop? And even if he put them in the storage locker instead, what would he do for space when the others began arriving? He didn’t want to end up shooting Carmody and his buddies. Not unless he absolutely had to. But he could not afford to have them hanging around, either.

“I’ll get Mr. Costigan,” he said softly.

“Damn right, you will,” Carmody said.

Jason clenched his fists, turned on his heel, and began walking quickly toward the repair shop.

Early tomorrow morning the fat Horace Carmodys of the world would stand on the flying bridges of their fifty-foot yachts with twin Cadillac engines, and wonder what had happened to change the world so drastically. None of them would realize that Jason Trench had happened. None of them would know how long Jason Trench had been waiting for this day; none of them would know the resistance he had met from the others at first, including his own wife; none of them would know how difficult it had been later on to find men they could trust completely, men who would be willing to sacrifice their lives for their country if the situation demanded it.

How do you recruit a secret army?

You are not Horace Carmody, you do not have millions of dollars at your disposal, you cannot engage men to conduct your research, no. You have only the money from Japan, perhaps thirty thousand dollars left after the years of living in New York, that and the five men who were your closest friends.

By the spring of 1962, they had honed and polished every facet of the operation, and knew that they needed a total of fifty men to take the town and hold it, to hijack the cutter, to carry out the plan. But where could they find forty-four additional men who felt as they did, and who would be willing to back their feelings with action?

They turned initially to the many protest organizations Jason and Randy had belonged to over the years. At first the faces blurred together into a gray mass of professional agitators, confused malcontents, neurotic misfits, excitement seekers, misguided patriots, bigots, bloody anarchists, fanatics. But they began to sort out the names and the faces, surprised by the overlap in separate groups, more surprised to discover they could come up with a list of seventy-five remembered names between them, the names of people they had known, people who felt as they did and who were willing to attend meetings, distribute literature, contribute funds, join in protest marches and rallies. They plotted chance encounters, they asked discreet questions, they probed, they searched; they could not tell these people too much and yet they had to tell enough to elicit at least a tentative response. By the end of the year they had recruited only fourteen men they knew they could trust; what had earlier been six was now twenty. They were making progress, but they still had less than half the number of men they felt they needed.

They went over the plan again. If they could not find fifty men, they would have to carry out their plan with fewer. They trimmed and cut and then, as with many economy measures, they discovered they had gone too far; they had reduced their needs too drastically. If they did not allow themselves a margin of safety, their plan had no hope of success. So they began revising once more, upward this time, moving away from their very low and impractical estimate and back toward their original figure. They finally decided they could do what had to be done with a total of forty-two men.

It took them almost seven months to find those men. It seemed at times as though this would be the hardest part of the entire operation, the enlisting of merely twenty-two additional men. They worked slowly and carefully, hand-picking their candidates and then exploring their backgrounds and their beliefs, avoiding personal contact until they were sure the aims and ideals of the group would meet with certain approval. Even then, after a man was accepted, the true and complete nature of the plan was not revealed to him until he had been with them for months and it was certain he would not defect. Perhaps they were too cautious in the beginning. They began to discover that men they had earlier enlisted were beginning to lose interest, were beginning to press for the action they had been promised. A man like Willy, who would have been considered poor material in the first several months of their search, was eagerly and somewhat recklessly courted toward the end. Harry Barnes was flatly denied acceptance by Jason when Alex Witten first offered him as a prospect. It was not until the plan seemed in total danger of collapse that Jason reluctantly allowed him to join the other men. By that time Alex was badgering him mercilessly. We’ve got to move on this, he kept saying. If we expect to keep these men together, we have to do more than talk of a vague operation that’ll take place sometime in a misty future with faceless compatriots who haven’t been found yet.

That misty future was today.

That vague operation was now in motion.

Those men now had faces, and guns, and they were willing to die for America.

By 1 A.M. tomorrow morning — or perhaps a trifle later, depending on weather conditions, but sometime early tomorrow morning — those men would change the course of history. What would all the fat pigs on their flying bridges say to that? Would they say “But I don’t understand. I have been sitting up here puffing on my dead cigar with my drunken crony friends and ordering people to do my bidding. I don’t understand what happened. I have been sitting here rich and fat and complacent and on the inside of everything, the inside of delicate blond women who say shan’t, the inside of expensive silent motorcars, the inside of stock market tips and plush restaurants, the inside of everything. What the hell happened?”

What happened is that you were not on the inside of Jason Trench’s head; that is what happened. You did not appreciate Jason Trench, nor what he did on his floating piece of mayhem in the Pacific. No, you chose to remember instead the incident with the Japanese whore in the Tokyo alley, yes, that was important, wasn’t it? Oh yes, that was very important. Well, you forgot that Jason Trench could change things. You forgot there was a man like Jason Trench who could and would die for his country if it meant restoring the country’s respect and protecting freedom and equality.

Yes.

Tomorrow morning your flying bridges won’t be worth a flying damn.

He threw open the door of the repair shop.

“Costigan!” he shouted. “Get out here!”

They walked in silence to the end of the pier, side by side.

Jason carried no gun, and there was no gun trained on Luke’s back as they approached the blue yacht. Luke’s instructions were simple. He was to get rid of this party of drunks immediately, without giving them any reason to believe anything was wrong here in Ocho Puertos. Jason was fairly certain that Luke would carry out his instructions without causing any trouble. His confidence was based on the knowledge that Samantha Watts was being held at gunpoint in the shop, and Clyde had orders to shoot her at once if anything funny happened on the pier.

“Well!” the voice boomed down from the command bridge. “Do I have the distinct honor of addressing Mr. Costigan at last?”

“How do you do, sir?” Luke said.

“I am Horace Carmody.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your man there refuses to sell us any whiskey.”

“We don’t have any to sell,” Luke said.

“You do not sell whiskey?”

“No, sir.”

“It’s uncivilized not to sell whiskey,” Carmody said to his friends. “The goddamn fellow is uncivilized.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t have a liquor license.”

“Yes, you should be sorry. If I did not have a liquor license, I would be sorry as hell.”

There was a long silence on the pier. Carmody was apparently gathering his thoughts and catching his breath for a new onslaught. Luke had just noticed what Carmody was wearing.

He did not know whether the fat man’s shirt carried all the flags and pennants in the international code, but it certainly seemed to be patterned with a great many of them. He could make out at least six different flags: Tango, Echo, Oscar, Uniform, Yankee, Foxtrot, wait, there were several more, Victor and November. He suddenly wondered if Carmody knew the code signals, and then wondered how he could possibly convey to a drunken sea captain the information that this town was being held by a band of armed men.

The silence lengthened ominously. He had been anxious to get rid of Carmody not three minutes ago, but now he was afraid that Carmody would leave before he could transmit a message to him. His eyes flicked again over the brightly colored flags printed on Carmody’s shirt. His mind raced through the code signals from H.O. 103, linking each flag with each remembered signal. Tango was DO NOT PASS AHEAD OF ME, Echo was I AM DIRECTING MY COURSE TO STARBOARD, Oscar was MAN OVERBOARD, Uniform was

Uniform might do.

Uniform just might do it.

YOU ARE STANDING INTO DANGER.

But would the flag mean anything to Carmody and his inebriated crew? And even if Carmody did understand it, might he not, in his drunken state, simply shout, “What do you mean, I’m standing into danger?”

“Well, how about it?” Carmody said.

Wait a minute. Was Jason Trench familiar with flags and pennants?

“He’s talking to you, Mr. Costigan,” Jason said beside him.

“How about what, sir?” Luke said.

“Do I get my whiskey, or not?”

“We don’t have any.”

“So I guess there’s nothing to do but shove off, Mr. Carmody,” Jason said.

“You see,” Luke said slowly, “there are uniform requirements for obtaining a liquor license in this state, and—”

“I’m not interested in the requirements for a liquor license,” Carmody said.

“Well, they’re uniform,” Luke said.

“What?”

“Uniform,” Luke said again. “Uniform, Mr. Carmody.”

“The goddamn man’s a broken record,” Carmody said. “Stand by to cast off, lads.”

It happened too fast. The two drunks who were Carmody’s line handlers had the lines off and were back on the yacht an instant before it began moving away from the pier. “Welcome to Costigan’s Marina,” Carmody said sourly, and one of the drunks added something obscene that caused all the others to burst into laughter. The long blue boat nosed out gently, and came around, and then put on a burst of speed to leave the dock front area in a roar of powerful engines and a spuming wash of spray, while Luke watched helplessly.

“Nice try,” Jason said, and hit him.

The blow was unexpected. It came with the full force of Jason’s arm and shoulder behind it, and it caught Luke on the bridge of the nose and sent him staggering back against one of the pilings. He put up his hands instantly, but Jason was upon him again, seizing the front of his shirt and pulling him away from the piling and then punching him furiously in the mouth, once, twice, again, and saying all the time, “You think you’re playing with kids, you lousy cripple? You think you’re playing with kids here?” Luke’s nose was bleeding. Over and over again, his fury a monumental thing from which there was no escape, Jason’s fists struck in harsh and angry, terrible succession. Luke tried to block each subsequent battering blow, the fists striking his open palms and his wrists — heavy hammerblows — his throat, his face again. He managed to double his left fist and threw it at Jason’s chest, but Jason shrugged off the blow and bore in again savagely, his rage unfettered, his fists covered with Luke’s blood now. He stopped suddenly.

He stopped with his right fist drawn back, his arm trembling, his breath hissing raggedly from between his parted lips. He stopped and looked out over the water. Luke turned and followed his gaze.

A light was blinking on the cutter.

Luke licked his lips and tasted the salt of his own blood, and began reading the message that came in short steady winks from the Coast Guard ship. He felt a sudden despair. He felt as though Jason Trench had tilted the world and everyone was sliding toward the edge of reality where they would fall off into nightmare oblivion. Out on the water the light blinked out its short and frightening message.

The ship is

Dah-dah-dah, dit-dit-dah, dit-dah-dit, dit-dit-dit.

Ours.

THE SHIP IS OURS.

12

There was a great deal of traffic at the pier.

Was some sort of naval maneuver in operation, was that it? Wasn’t that a Navy ship out on the horizon, less than a mile offshore?

Roger Cummings lay flat on the beach with his head raised above the dune, and tried to make out what was happening in the distance. He wished he had binoculars.

Something odd was going on, of that he was certain; and he was becoming more and more convinced that all of it was somehow linked to the man and woman who had come to the front door of the Westerfield house and tried the knob. He and Sondra had watched from the upstairs bedroom window as the man went around to the driver’s side of the car and the woman got in on the side closest to the house, and then the car started, and made its way around the turnabout and went up the driveway and out of sight.

“What do you suppose that was all about?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Sondra said.

“You don’t suppose that fellow was a hunter, do you?”

“Which fellow? Oh, you mean the one with the gun?”

“Yes.”

“He could have been.”

“Did it seem to you that he was threatening that woman in any way?”

“No. The gun wasn’t even pointed at her or anything.”

“That’s right,” Cummings said. “Did you notice that?”

“They seemed very friendly, in fact,” Sondra said.

“That’s what I thought. Perhaps they know Westerfield.”

“Who’s Westerfield?”

“He owns this house. Myron Westerfield. Maybe they know him and dropped by to say hello.”

“Maybe. Where did you leave our car, Rog?”

“In the garage.”

“Then how would they know anybody was here?”

“They wouldn’t,” Cummings said. He was frowning again. “The odd thing about it, of course, is that their car was parked in the driveway at... what time was it, Sondra? When did I go out to take a look?”

“Oh... nine-thirty, ten o’clock. Around then.”

“Yes. So what took them an hour to get to the front door? More than an hour.”

“I don’t know, Rog.” She kissed him on the cheek and said, “Maybe they found something to do on the way.”

She looked at him then and giggled at the serious expression on his face.

“It’s the rifle that bothers me,” he said.

He had left the house at two-forty, unable to sit still a moment longer, curiosity clamoring inside him. He had walked up to the main highway and then looked across to where the barricade was set across the top of the side road. The barricade was innocuous and commonplace; he associated it at once with the armed man who had come to the front door, and immediately looked upon it with dark suspicion.

Get back to the house, he warned himself.

You are Roger Cummings. Get back to the house before you find yourself in more trouble than you ever imagined.

Instead he had gone off to the right of the side road, swinging around past the barricade and into the thicket, passing behind the first house on the road and then cutting over to the beach.

Lying at the far end of the beach, he could see the maroon-and-black cabin cruiser coming from the ship directly to the pier. He could not tell how many men were aboard the cruiser, or how many men in blue — all carrying weapons — were waiting on the dock. There seemed to be at least a half-dozen. They climbed aboard the cruiser as soon as it reached the dock. The moment they were loaded, the boat pulled out again. Cummings watched it moving out to the ship. It stayed alongside for perhaps ten minutes, and then started back toward shore again.

The town seemed silent and deserted except for the activity at the pier, the boat coming in from the ship out there, more men in blue massing on the waterfront.

Weren’t there any people in this town?

Where are all the people? he wondered.

Cautiously he crawled up the beach and closer to the pier. Crouching behind an empty oil barrel, he watched the activity there unobserved. It was entirely possible, he supposed, that the Navy was conducting some sort of maneuvers in the area. He glanced out over the water to where the ship sat in pale silhouette and saw the marking W 017 on her bow and wondered what kind of Navy vessel she was, and why she was in these waters. The nature of the maneuvers puzzled him, too, because he could not imagine any naval games that would include a young man escorting a woman to the front door of a civilian’s home, unless the woman was a Navy nurse, was that possible? She had, after all, been wearing white. But no hat. Didn’t nurses always wear hats? Didn’t Navy nurses have a little white hat with the gold stripe or stripes of their rank showing on it?

He crouched behind his oil barrel, confused, and tried to figure out the pattern of the maneuvers. He could see the pier clearly now, could see the cabin cruiser tied there, could even read the name lettered across her transom, The Golden Fleece. There was a very fat man in khaki standing on the pier together with four other men in dungarees and chambray shirts, all of whom were armed. There were six men standing in the cockpit of the cruiser. One of them was holding a gun in his hand and the other five were standing with their hands clasped on the tops of their heads. All of them were dressed in the work clothes of Navy enlisted men, which made very little sense to Cummings unless the men in the boat were wearing little tags or buttons that distinguished the blue team from the red team, something like that. Otherwise, why would one enlisted man be pointing a gun at five other enlisted men who had their hands on their heads, while still more men waited on the dock?

The men in the boat were coming ashore now.

The one with the gun pointed it in Cummings’ direction. Cummings immediately ducked his head down below the rim of the oil barrel and then realized the man was only indicating a long building forward of the pier. The building was made of corrugated metal. It seemed to have only one door and no windows, some sort of storage locker, he imagined. The men with their hands on their heads began marching toward the building, and a man with a rifle came out of the adjacent building to lead them away.

“You want to bring your men aboard, Fatboy?” a voice on the boat said. Cummings could not see who had spoken; the voice had come from inside the wheelhouse. The one called Fatboy nodded quickly and led his men into the idling boat. As the boat pulled away, another group of men moved onto the pier, this time led by a man who had pale white skin and jet-black hair. Cummings looked toward the storage locker in time to see the single door being slammed shut, a padlock being bolted into place. The man with the rifle stationed himself outside the door.

Out on the water The Golden Fleece sped toward the ship on the horizon. Cummings, frowning, watched it.

They had gone through one of the bottles of bourbon and opened the next, and now they lay on the bed drinking from two white coffee mugs they had found on Bobby’s shelf next to the picture of Ava Gardner. There was no ice in the mugs, and no water, just straight bourbon, and the cups were filled almost to the brim. They were in a silly giggly mood, both naked, Ginny toying with the crisp blond hair on Willy’s chest, and Willy lying with the back of his head between her breasts, her arms around him, giggling and trying to sip at the bourbon without spilling it all over himself. He managed to get a dribble of whiskey down his throat and then choked on it, and sat up and began giggling again and Ginny said, “You’re the slobbiest man I know.”

“You’re the sexiess woman I know,” he said, and rolled over and kissed her nipples and then made a ravenous slurping sound and bent swiftly to lick her navel. He burst out laughing.

“This’s a massive navel operation,” he said.

“What?” she said, laughing. “What do you mean?”

“This,” he said, and he put his tongue in her navel again and then reached for his coffee mug and held it high, spilling some of the bourbon onto his wrist. “Here is to Jason Trench’s massive navel operation,” he shouted. “Did you ever have a massive navel operation?”

“Never,” she said, and giggled and picked up her own mug. “Listen, do we have to have her staring at us?”

“Who?”

“Ava Gabor there, whatever her name is.”

“Gardner,” Willy said.

“Yeah.”

“We don’t need her.” He moved toward the picture and placed his forefinger on the movie star’s left breast with delicate precision and said to the photograph, “Miss Gardner, have you ever had a massive navel operation? No,” he answered himself. “I didn’t think you did,” and tore the picture from the wall. “There. No more Peepy Toms,” he said, and burst out laughing again. “What it is, it’s like a massive hernia operation,” he said and slapped his naked thigh and drank some more bourbon and said, “Ginny, honey, let’s do it again.”

“Let’s do what again?” she said.

“Let’s go shoot that guy.”

“What guy?”

“Son a bitch who wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Let’s shoot all the sonabitches who won’t listen to you,” Ginny said.

“Well, that’s a whole hell of a lot of people,” Willy said, giggling. “There’s fifty-five of them alone on that ship out there, none of them listening to me. We can’t go shooting everybody don’t want to listen to me, now, can we?”

“Sure, we can, why not? What ship out where?”

“The masshole navel operation,” Willy said, and began laughing again. “Jason’s asshole operation,” he said, and nearly choked. “Oh my God, he’s got fifty-five men out there who’re taking orders from a preggen woman, how about that?”

“What? Who?” Ginny said, and laughed and threw one leg over his thigh and began moving against him rhythmically and without passion, almost as a reflex action.

“Out there,” he said, pointing to where Ava Gardner’s picture had been. “That’s where the ship is. And what Jason’s doing is taking ’em off, you see? Except engineers and such. You see?”

“Sure,” Ginny said.

“What, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“What is it?”

“What is what?”

“What he’s doing?”

“He’s taking them off.”

“Off what?” Willy asked.

“His bellybutton,” Ginny said, and they both burst out laughing.

“The cutter!” Willy said.

“What cutter?”

“The Coast Guard cutter. The Mercury.”

“Oh.”

“That’s right,” Willy said.

“I say three cheers,” Ginny said.

“For what?”

“For Jonas.”

“Jason.”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“He brought you here to love me,” Ginny said.

“That’s what he did, that li’l sweetheart,” Willy said, and began giggling into Ginny’s collarbone. “Now, listen.”

“I’m listening.”

“Fifty-five men on that cutter, you hear?”

“I hear.”

“He’s bringing almost all of them here, putting them in the storage locker.”

His eyes had narrowed, his voice had lowered. Ginny squinted her eyes in imitation and moved closer to him.

“But you know what?”

“What?” Ginny said.

“He’s sending twenty-five of us out there!”

“Out where?”

“To the cutter. On the cutter.”

“What for?”

“To run it. To drive it. To, you know, make it go.”

“Can’t the Coast Guard make it go?”

“Sure, honey,” Willy said. “But not where Jason wants it to go.”

“Well, where does Jason want it to go?”

“Ah-ha,” Willy said. “That’s a secret.”

“Oh, you got secrets from me, huh?” she said, and teasingly tweaked his nose and then rolled into his lap and pulled her face back some three inches from his and pursed her lips and kissed him. “Where’s Jason gonna go, huh?” she said. “Where’s he gonna go? Tell me or I’ll kiss you to death.” He giggled and she kissed his eyes and his mouth and his nose again. “Huh? Where?”

Laughing, Willy said, “It’s a secret.”

“Where?” she said. “Huh? Where? Huh? Huh?”

It was possible, of course, that the men moving out toward that ship were not bona fide United States sailors. Yes, that was possible, Cummings thought. If this were a real naval maneuver, then only Navy boats would be in use. That maroon-and-black cabin-cruiser was definitely not a Navy boat, and neither was the white Chris-Craft that had come in from the ship and was now unloading more men at the pier.

Prisoners.

Yes.

That was the accurate word.

Those men coming onto the dock with their hands on their heads were prisoners, and they would be taken to the storage locker to join the others there under lock and key.

Cummings could hear muffled voices, “Move along, let’s keep it moving,” could see brass shining on khaki collars — some of the prisoners were officers, then — could hear a man shouting, “Goody, let’s move half those men out of the houses now,” and then heard the answering “Right, Jase!” and the sound of feet clattering on the wooden dock. The men from the ship were moving toward the storage locker. “How many more are on the cutter?” someone asked, and Cummings could not hear the reply, but he understood now that the ship out there was a Coast Guard vessel, and then he heard a phone ringing in one of the houses on the waterfront. He glanced over his shoulder, trying to locate the house. He thought the ringing sound was coming from the first house on the beach, more voices, the sound of an engine idling, the clattering noise that could come only from weapons, a door opening; he turned his head. A man with a rifle was coming out of the back door of the first house. Before the door closed, Cummings could see that another armed man was still in the house. The first man ran toward the pier, his rifle at port arms, and suddenly another phone was ringing in another house, another door was opening, another lone man with a rifle stepped out and moved swiftly and silently toward the waiting white Chris-Craft at the pier’s end. The door to the storage locker slammed shut, the loud click of the padlock snapped onto the air, another telephone was ringing.

“Enjoying yourself, mister?” a voice said.

Marvin watched as they brought the stranger into the repair shop and threw him headlong across the floor, near where Costigan was sitting beside Samantha. They were behaving differently now, these men. It had begun, he supposed, when they brought Costigan back not more than a half hour ago, his nose bleeding, his left eye squinted shut, his clothes stained with grease. A tenseness had come into the shop with his return. Harry had begun pacing the room with long impatient strides. Clyde, silent and lackadaisical before, had suddenly become alert and edgy. The same knife-edged tautness was apparent in the manner of the men who opened the door now, throwing the stranger in onto the floor. Marvin, watching them, sensing their tenseness, had the feeling that something outside was reaching a climax and that once the climax had passed, his life would be in real danger. He looked at the man on the floor. The right side of his face was bruised and swollen as though he had been hit once, sharply, with something blunt. On the other side of the room Harry held a hurried, whispered conversation with the two men who had brought the man in, and then nodded and said goodbye to them as they walked out. He went over to the man and stood beside him spread-legged, almost straddling him.

“What’s your name?” he said.

The man did not answer.

Marvin, watching the pair, suddenly realized that Harry had his back to him. He almost reached for the bottle of thinner on the shelves, and then realized that Clyde was sitting on the workbench and that any move would be seen by him immediately.

“I said, What’s your name, mister?” Harry said.

“What have you done?” the man asked suddenly. “Hijacked a Coast Guard cutter?”

Harry turned toward Clyde quickly, his eyes opening in surprise. Clyde got off the bench and moved toward where the man was sitting on the floor, standing opposite Harry so that one of them was on either side of the man. Marvin kept watching them carefully. Harry’s back was still to him. Clyde was only half turned away from him.

“You must’ve seen quite a little bit out there on the beach, huh, mister?” Harry said.

“I saw enough.”

“What’s your name?” Harry said.

Again the man would not answer.

“Get his wallet,” Harry said to Clyde.

“Cummings,” the man said. And then, very quickly, so quickly that Marvin knew at once he was lying, the man said, “David Cummings.”

“Sometimes, Mr. Cummings, it ain’t healthy to see too much.”

“Sure, listen to the gangsters,” Tannenbaum said. “Talk from gangster pictures with James Cagney.”

“Shut up, Doc,” Harry said. “Just what’d you see out there, Mr. Cummings?”

“What do you want with that cutter?” Cummings asked, ignoring the question.

“Clyde,” Harry said.

Clyde took two steps toward Cummings, his hand going up high over his head at the same time, and then descending in a long swinging arc that seemed almost a part of his forward momentum. Marvin, watching Clyde, frightened and fascinated, almost missed his opportunity to grab the half gallon of thinner. He saw Cummings’ head snap back, and he heard Cummings grunt in pain, and then suddenly realized that Clyde’s back was to him. Quickly he slid to the end of the bench, rose, turned, grabbed a bottle from the shelf, put it down behind the bench, sat, and then turned toward the three men again, his heart pounding. They had not seen him.

He realized all at once how idiotic his sudden move had been. They could have turned at any instant. They would have beaten him up the way they had Costigan, who sat now with a bloody handkerchief to his nose, the way they were doing with this new man Cummings.

“Well?” Harry said.

Cummings got to his feet. “Let’s get something straight here,” he said.

“Only thing we want to get straight is—”

“No, you just—”

“—what you saw outside.”

“—listen to me a minute.”

The men stood facing each other.

“Mister,” Harry said, “we’re gonna have to hurt you.”

“Will that change what I saw outside?”

Harry grinned. “Clyde, I think you’d better—”

Cummings took a step backward and clenched his fists. “This time I’m ready for him,” he said.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Clyde said.

“This time, you’d better kill me.”

“How brave you gonna be when he hits you with that gun butt?” Harry said.

“Ask him to try it.”

“Mr. Cummings,” Harry said, “we’ve got nothing to lose.”

“Then you know how serious this is.”

“How serious what is?” Clyde said.

“The hijacking of a government vessel.”

“Is that what we did, Mr. Cummings?”

“They’re comedians, mister,” Tannenbaum said. “They crack jokes from vaudeville.”

“Pop, keep quiet,” Marvin said, and Harry turned toward him, and fear crackled into his skull. Could he see the bottle of thinner behind the bench? Was the bottle showing?

“What’s the penalty?” Clyde asked, grinning.

“What do you mean?” Cummings said. “Penalty?”

“For hijacking.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Are you a lawyer?”

“Yes.”

“Then what’s the penalty? Ten years? Twenty? Life? The electric chair? What?”

“I don’t know. Hijacking a cutter isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence.”

“Is that right? You hear that, Harry? I thought cutters did get hijacked every day. You mean they don’t? Tch, tch.”

“If you want my opinion,” Cummings said, “I think you ought to go to whoever’s in charge of this little adventure, and ask him to forget it. That’s my opinion. Get off that ship and out of this town before you’re all in more trouble than you ever imagined.”

“Us?” Clyde said, and burst out laughing. “In trouble? Man, we’ve been in trouble since six o’clock this morning.”

“What are you doing here anyway?” Bobby Colmore said suddenly. “Why’d you come here?”

“To hijack a cutter,” Clyde answered immediately.

“The cutter’s out on the water,” Costigan said. “Why do you need the town?”

“How’s your nose, Mr. Costigan?” Clyde said.

“My nose is fine. Why do you need the town?”

“Tell him, Harry.”

“I’m telling him nothing, Clyde. You want my advice, you better shut up right now.”

“Why? What’s the matter?”

“Just cool it, that’s all.”

“Why won’t you let him talk?” Amos said.

“Sure, Harry, why won’t you let me—”

“Clyde, shut up!” Harry shouted. He jerked his rifle up. “Now, shut up. I mean it, man. I mean it. One more word—”

“Hey, come on,” Clyde said, and grinned.

“Man, you say one more word, and you’re dead, man. I mean it.”

Clyde flushed crimson, and then caught his breath, nodded, and said, “Sure. Take it easy.”

“How come he ain’t laughing now?” Amos said.

Harry still had not lowered the rifle. It was pointed at Clyde’s middle. Clyde, his face red, kept staring at the muzzle of the gun.

“I thought he laughed at just about everything you said. I thought you got along just like two brothers,” Amos said.

“We get along fine,” Harry answered, not taking his eyes from Clyde. Quickly he lowered the rifle. Clyde nodded again, and then walked directly past Harry without looking at him. He boosted himself onto the workbench, sat, and put the rifle across his lap. He closed his eyes at once, as though he were enormously weary after a long, grueling ordeal.

“Just what did you see out there?” Costigan asked Cummings.

“Luke, don’t—” Samantha began.

“I want to know,” he said.

“Go ahead, tell him,” Clyde said, his eyes shut.

Cummings hesitated a moment. Sighing, he said, “I saw them moving armed men out to that cutter. And bringing men here, locking them up in the other building.”

“The storage locker?”

“If that’s what it is. The one without any windows.”

“Then that’s why they needed the town,” Costigan said. “So they’d have a place to bring that cutter in and transfer their men to it.”

“But why?” Tannenbaum said, and turned to Clyde. “Why are you stealing a boat? For scrap iron? For what?”

“For war,” Clyde said, his eyes still shut.

There was, for the space of a heartbeat, silence in the shop. Clyde’s words hung without malice, almost without meaning, in the empty stillness. The silence seemed longer than it actually was. Clyde did not move from the bench. He kept leaning back against the wall with his eyes closed and a faint smile on his face as the silence turned in upon itself, second lengthening into second after second after second, all compressed and compacted into a split instant.

“What do you mean?” Cummings asked.

“Clyde—”

“Keep quiet, Harry. They know most of it already!”

“They don’t know—”

“What is it?” Costigan said. “Another—”

“Shut up, all of you!”

“Talk, Costigan.”

“No, never mind.”

Silence again. Marvin, his mind working frantically, could not for the life of him imagine what Costigan had been about to say. And what had Clyde meant? What the hell was a Coast Guard cutter? It was just a little boat, wasn’t it? Like a pleasure boat?

“Well?” Clyde said. His eyes were still shut. He was not looking at anyone in the room, but Marvin knew unmistakably that he was talking to Costigan.

“Well?” he said again.

“You’ll never make it,” Costigan said.

“No?”

“Never. She’s too small a ship.”

“She’s big enough.”

Costigan was shaking his head. “What has she got aboard her? Seventy-five men? A hundred men?”

“Fifty-five,” Clyde said. “Less when we get through with her.”

“And what’s your armament? A three-inch gun on the bow?”

“That’s all.”

“What do you hope to do with that?”

“Just what we have to do.”

“It’ll be another disaster,” Costigan said. “Just like the Bay of Pigs. Go tell Trench to forget it.”

Clyde shook his head. “Too much at stake.”

“Like what?”

“The future.”

“Of what? Cuba?”

“Of the hemisphere.”

“Sure,” Costigan said. “You’re going to change the situation with a two-bit gunboat and a handful of men. Forget it.”

“We’re going to change the situation by steaming straight into Havana Harbor, and—”

“Sure, past the Cuban radar—”

“—shelling the city.”

“—and past the Cuban torpedo boats and jets. You’ve got one hell of a chance to succeed.”

“Are you serious about this?” Cummings asked suddenly.

“The man wants to know if we’re serious. Tell him, Harry.”

“I ain’t in this,” Harry said. “When Jason asks about this, I had no part in it.”

“Yes, we’re serious, goddamn you,” Clyde said.

“You’re going to invade Cuba?”

“Did I say that?”

“It sounded to me—”

“Nobody said anything about invading Cuba.”

“You said you were going to shell the city.”

“We’re sure going to try.”

“The island is ringed with radar,” Costigan said. “You won’t get within fifty miles of it.”

“That’s more’n halfway there, ain’t it?” Clyde said, and grinned.

“You can’t shell Havana from fifty miles out in the Caribbean.”

“I think we might get just a bit closer than that,” Clyde said.

“They’ll still know you’re on the way. Your little raid—”

“This isn’t a raid.”

“It’s not an invasion, and it’s not a raid,” Tannenbaum said. “So what is it?”

“Herbert, keep out,” Rachel said.

“Never mind,” he answered.

“Maybe it’s both a raid and an invasion,” Clyde said. His smile widened. “Or maybe it’s neither.”

“Riddles,” Tannenbaum said.

“No riddles, Grandpa.”

“I’m getting Jason,” Harry said, and started for the door.

“Hold it!”

“Listen, Clyde—”

“You listen to me!”

“Jason said—”

“What am I doing to Jason?”

“You got no call to—”

“How am I hurting Jason, huh? What am I doing that’s so terrible, huh?”

“You know what—”

“Well, I’m tired of sitting here on my behind! Why should Jason have all the fun!”

“The fun?” Harry said, astonished.

“Yes, the fun, the fun! We sit here like a pair of nursemaids while he—”

“Fun?” Harry said again.

“Why doesn’t he take all of us with him?”

“Somebody has to stay here, you know that.”

“What for?”

“To keep these people here.”

“Kill the goddamn people,” Clyde said. “Do it now! Why wait?”

“Gangsters,” Tannenbaum said. “They grab a boat, they talk about kill—”

“A cutter, Grandpa,” Clyde said. “A cutter is what we grabbed. Not a boat.”

“You’ll never make it,” Costigan said again. “There are dozens of Navy ships between here and Cuba. The United States doesn’t want an invasion. Those ships’ll—”

“We know all about the dozens of Navy ships between here and Cuba. You think any Navy ship is going to challenge a Coast Guard cutter answering a distress call?”

“Who’ll buy that?”

“Who won’t? A few hours after the Mercury steams out of here, she’ll radio Miami and say she’s answering an SOS about fifty miles northwest of Havana.”

“Miami won’t believe it,” Costigan said.

“Why not?”

“They’ve got planes in the air. They’ll send one down to check.”

“You’re assuming Miami knows the cutter is in our hands, which Miami doesn’t. Miami simply thinks the captain of one of her ships is radioing to say he’s answering an SOS from—”

“That Miami never heard?”

“It happens all the time,” Clyde said. “Radio signals are unpredictable.”

“They’d still send the plane down.”

“No. All the planes are back at Dinner Key by sundown.”

The room was silent for a moment. Costigan frowned, and Samantha suddenly covered his hand with her own.

“Those Navy destroyers would challenge her,” Cummings said.

“Why should they? They know there are Coast Guard ships on patrol between here and Cuba. They wouldn’t give her a second thought. But even if they did, she’d say she was answering a distress call. Search and rescue is the Coast Guard’s job — not the Navy’s.”

“The cutter simply lies to everybody, is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“There are some people she can’t lie to,” Costigan said.

“Who?”

“The men on the Cuban patrol boats.”

“She won’t lie to them.”

“She’ll just tell them she’s heading for Havana, huh? She’ll—”

“No. She’ll just open fire on them.”

“That’d bring out the jets,” Costigan said. “That’d be the end of your little party.”

“No. That’d be the beginning of our little party.”

“They’d blow you right out of the water,” Cummings said.

“Yes.”

“What...?”

“They’ll blow us right out of the water,” Clyde said. “They’ll blow a United States Coast Guard cutter out of the water.” He smiled. “That’s an act of war, isn’t it?” he asked softly.

13

They’ll have to kill everyone here, Luke thought.

If they don’t, their suicidal plan is in danger of collapsing.

Their only hope is that the United States and the world will believe a Coast Guard cutter has been attacked and sunk by Cuban forces while answering a distress call. If the masquerade is less than complete, if the tiniest doubt exists about the genuineness of the cutter or the real identity of the men aboard her, the plan will immediately collapse.

Luke could see no possibility of anything going wrong out there on the water; the thing had been planned too carefully for that. They had captured Ocho Puertos and brought the cutter here, they were moving the sailors into the storage locker and putting their own men aboard, they knew there would be no patrol planes flying after dark. They also knew that the danger of the Navy’s stopping them was practically nonexistent. And even if they were challenged, they had a cover story ready: they were answering a distress call. So they would head for Cuba, and they would fire on the first thing they saw, torpedo boat or jet airplane, or Havana itself. When the counterattack came, they would radio Miami to say they were being fired upon by Cubans without provocation, and then they would radio to say they were being sunk by Cubans. The Cubans, of course, would protest that the cutter had opened fire first — but neither the United States nor the world would believe them.

The only hitch was Ocho Puertos.

In Ocho Puertos there were people who had been held captive since dawn, and who now knew about the plan. In Ocho Puertos there were sailors who had been moved from the cutter, and who knew the ship had been taken by force. In Ocho Puertos there were men and women who could immediately squelch the elaborate lie off the shores of Cuba.

They would have to kill everyone in town before they left.

They would undoubtedly be listening for word on the radio, oh yes, the news would go out at once, the world would know in an instant what had happened out there in the Caribbean. And presuming everything had gone as planned, presuming the cutter and the men who had gone down with her were accepted as genuine, presuming the Cuban attack clearly seemed an overt act of aggression, then the men left behind here in town would have to wipe out all traces of themselves. They would strip their Coast Guard prisoners of clothes and identification, they would kill everyone in town, and then they would leave. Wasn’t that what Clyde had said? “Kill the goddamn people. Kill them now. Why wait?” Yes, and while the police tried to solve a puzzling and senseless mass murder on a tiny key called Ocho Puertos, the government of the United States would either immediately retaliate against Cuba with rockets and bombs, or else go through the more formal process of declaring war first. Either way, Jason Trench would have accomplished his goal.

It’ll never work, Cummings thought.

We’ve had American aircraft shot down before, we’ve had pilots captured, we’ve had truckfuls of men detained at checkpoints, we’ve even had private citizens held prisoner behind the Curtain. None of these had ever led to even a limited war. This was a little different, of course; this was a little closer to American shores. And it did not involve an individual person or a small group of persons; it involved fifty-five men, which was almost a quarter of an Army company, mmmm. But even so, there wasn’t the slightest possibility that America would respond to such an attack by declaring war. We were too sensible for that, we knew the awesome consequences, we would prefer sacrificing the ship and the men if it meant preserving the peace.

We would undoubtedly take it to the United Nations. We would set a pattern for the rest of the world. We would maintain that even in the face of a ruthless, unprovoked act of aggression, we were nonetheless refusing to retaliate with our terrible, swift power. Instead, we were taking the matter to the world organization, where we had every reason to believe it would be settled. We would ask reparation from Cuba, of course, and then we would

Oh yes, the newspapers would have a field day with that. What kind of reparation do you ask for fifty-five men dead or crippled, all or any part of them? How do you explain reparation to wives and mothers and children? Oh yes, that would be a sweet one for the yellow journalists. And there were men on Capitol Hill who would argue, perhaps rightfully, that no amount of reparation could restore our image in the eyes of the world if we let this unprovoked and unwarranted attack go unanswered. These men would leap upon the sinking of the cutter as an excuse for the action they had been demanding all along. They would seize upon the attack as an opportunity to restage the Bay of Pigs blunder, invade Cuba in force this time, eliminate her threat in the Western Hemisphere once and for all.

But of course the cooler heads would insist that the world organization be the arbiter. Let the United Nations try the case; if necessary, let the United Nations send a force in to disarm Cuba and remove any further possibility of wanton

There were still Russians on the island.

He could not remember a single instance where the U.N. had forcibly disarmed a member nation.

If they tried it with Cuba, there would be a global war.

There were men in Washington who would argue that if the possibility of war existed either way, why waste lives? Push the buttons, send the rockets, get rid of the goddamn threat, do it now! They’ve sunk one of our ships! What do we have to do — wait until they wade ashore in Miami?

It could work, Cummings thought. Jason Trench could get the war he wanted.

No, Cummings thought. This is absurd. This entire thing is absurd. There were fanatics in the world, yes, that was true. But authority had an uncanny knack of stopping fanatics before they ever carried out their plans. In a world of extremes, the extremists rarely were permitted to act. There was talk, yes, always talk. Talk on street corners and in assembly halls, heated oratory pouring from the lips of rabble-rousers, hatred shaped to fit the mold of democracy. In a free nation you can speak your mind, that is an inalienable right, stand on your soapbox and advocate the overthrow of a nation — but do not move into action. If you do, if you are foolish enough to translate your hatred, right or left, into movement, you are doomed. The Marines will always arrive just in the nick of time to foil your plot, whatever it may be.

It was difficult to think beyond this room. Beyond this room there was a cutter loading men dressed in the uniforms of Coast Guard sailors, men who would take that ship into Cuban waters and open fire on Cuban property in the hope they would be sunk. Beyond this room there were fanatics who had moved beyond their own rhetoric into sudden and decisive action.

I can stop them, Cummings thought.

I could make one phone call, just one; they would believe me, they would move immediately to

He suddenly remembered that among the other dangers lurking beyond this room was a twenty-year-old girl in a house across the road, and she was his mistress. Even if he could get to a telephone, which was doubtful, he would have to say where he was; he would have to tell them the jumping-off spot for Jason Trench’s plan was a town called Ocho Puertos in the Florida Keys.

For perhaps the first time in his life, Roger Cummings wondered if the Marines would indeed arrive.

The two highway patrolmen watched the car as it came out of the water, choked with grass, dripping, the winch tugging it reluctantly out of the mud. They were both big men, and the day was warm, and they were sweating across the fronts and under the arms of their tan uniform shirts. The first patrolman was named Oscar, and his partner’s name was Frank, and they kept making hand signals to the winch operator in the cab of the truck, until finally the patrol car was on dry ground.

“It’s empty,” Oscar said.

“Yeah,” Frank answered.

Oscar opened the door on the driver’s side, and looked in. A trooper’s hat was resting on the front seat. He picked it up and studied the sweatband. The name R. HOGAN was stamped into the leather.

“It’s Ronnie’s car, all right,” Oscar said.

“What’s that on the crown of the hat there?” Frank said.

“Huh? Where do you... oh.”

Both men stared at the hat.

“It’s blood,” Oscar said.

“Yeah,” Frank answered.

“There’s the keys, right there in the dash,” Oscar said.

“Mmm.”

Frank took the keys out of the ignition slot. He held them on the palm of his hand for a moment, looking down at them silently. Then he said, “I reckon we’d better take a look in the trunk.”

They’re not figuring on annihilation, Marvin thought. That’s not in their plan at all. They may have to sacrifice the handful of men who are taking the ship down to Cuba, yes, but not because they expect America to be wiped out. On the contrary. They’re hoping there will be swift and sudden reprisal from us, a counterattack that will destroy Cuba’s potential in this hemisphere. They are gambling that Russia will not step into this thing at all — why should she? Cuba will be labeled the aggressor, the nation that sank a ship answering an SOS. Why should Russia risk adverse world opinion by keeping her promise to a small country that has already been successfully invaded?

Your plan sounds good, Marvin thought. I like it, Jason, I’m almost tempted. You are going to sacrifice a small Coast Guard ship that doesn’t even belong to you, plus two or three dozen men, but you’re going to get Cuba in return. That sounds like a good deal, a bargain for fanatics. The trouble with fanatics, of course, is that they never realize there are other fanatics in the world. What you’re perfectly willing to assume, Jason, is that we will not risk nuclear warfare, but will instead fight a limited war with conventional arms. You are ready to assume — because it fits your plans — that Russia will stay out of it. But suppose she doesn’t? Suppose she decides to push the retaliation button, what then, Jason?

You almost had me.

I can be had, you know.

If you’d only held out a realistic war to me, if you’d only extended a uniform glittering with brass, and a rifle I could shoot with impunity; if you’d offered me French girls with their eager pouting mouths or subjugated Russian peasant women obediently opening strong meaty thighs, or slender starving Chinese girls in slit skirts begging mercy from the American conqueror; if you’d offered me the spoils of war and the glamour of war, and the thrill of legal murder, rape and pillage; if you’d offered me all these things, Jason Trench, I would have walked across this room and shaken hands with your henchmen there, and joined your cause. I would have, I swear it. I would have kicked Selma in the ass and gone off to pick up glory like foreign coins at my feet. I would have done that.

But you offer possible ashes in my mouth; you offer possible blinding demolition and extinction, not escape. War is old-fashioned now, I guess. The killers have no place to go any more, except into the streets. Or, perhaps, on suicidal missions to Cuba to trigger what could become a holocaust.

If it’s fire you wish, Jason Trench, I can accommodate you.

The radioman’s name was Evan Peters, and he had relieved the Miami watch at 1545, and was now filing messages from the watch before. Big Chief Osama, who had stayed on to have a cup of coffee with the relieving watch section, was sitting at the desk alongside Peters, who was sorting and collating the sheaf of messages preparatory to putting them in their proper cabinets.

“I’m supposed to see this girl tonight,” Osama said, sipping his coffee. “She says she’s a Russian countess. You believe it?”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s got red hair. You think there’s such a thing as a redheaded Russian?”

“Sure, there must be plenty of them,” Peters said.

“Why would a Russian countess want to go out with an Indian?”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“I did.”

“What’d she say?”

“She said we were both in the same fix. She lost everything when her parents got killed in the revolution, and I lost everything when the United States stuck my tribe on a reservation. What do you think of that?”

“I don’t know,” Peters said. “What do you think?”

“I think she’s full of crap.”

“Maybe she’s a spy,” Peters said.

“What do you mean?”

“A secret agent. She knows you work here in Search and Rescue, and she’s trying to get information out of you.”

“Yeah, I’ll give her some information, all right,” Osama said, and burst out laughing. He lifted his coffee cup, drained it, put it down on the desktop again, and rose. He stretched his arms toward the ceiling, laughed again, and said, “I’ll give her some fine information, all right.” Laughing, he took his hat from where it was resting on one of the cabinets, winked at Peters, said, “Take it easy, kid,” and walked out of the message center. Outside, Peters could hear him telling Mr. Bordigian that he had a date with a Russian spy, would Mr. Bordigian recommend him for a commission if he promised not to give her any secrets? Mr. Bordigian laughed, and the Chief laughed with him and even Peters, sorting his messages, was forced to smile a little.

The smile dropped from his mouth when he saw the word ZUG on the message from the Mercury.

He separated the message from the others in the pile, and read it over carefully:

Peters had no prior knowledge of anything that had happened during the noon watch, but the message in his hands told him a great deal. It had been sent from the Mercury at 1845 ZULU, which was 1845 Greenwich Mean Time or 1345 Eastern Standard Time. It had been sent to the commander of Coast Guard District Seven, with a copy of the message going to the Miami Air Station for information. The Merc had either intercepted or gone to the assistance of a cabin cruiser called The Golden Fleece and the boat was now in tow, with her passengers aboard the cutter. One of the passengers was a pregnant woman who was in need of

But why the ZUG?

Peters read the message again. He knew that ZUG meant No or Negative, and he couldn’t understand how anyone could have made a mistake like that, preceding the entire text of a message with the word No. Unless, of course, it wasn’t a mistake, in which case the ZUG was a part of the message itself.

ZUG, Peters thought.

No.

Negative.

No what?

Negative what?

Negative everything following the ZUG?

Peters lighted a cigarette and debated bringing the message to the attention of Mr. Bordigian outside.

If the fire comes, Amos thought, we’ll all be black. We’ll all get roasted in that two, three seconds it takes for the big bomb to do it, that’s it, man, zero. Black zero. We’ll all be laying there on the ground and anybody comes along to take a look at us, he won’t know if we colored or white because we’ll all be roasted the same. Governor Wallace up there, he’s gonna be laying right next to some big blackass nigger, and ain’t nobody gonna be able to tell them apart. Jason Trench, he gonna bring true democracy to America at last. After a hundred years of arguing, Jason Trench is finally gonna end all the discussion. He’s gonna take his boat down to Cuba and get it sunk, and then we’ll send up our rockets and they’ll send back they rockets, and black men and white men’ll lay on the ground together roasted like pigs. They’ll be American whitemen-blackmen, and Russian whitemen-blackmen, and even Chinese yellowmen-blackmen, the whole damn world’s gonna be black, all because of Jason Trench, he is certainly the savior of the poor colored folk, amen. Only thing is, Jason, I ain’t got a hankering to wake up dead in the morning, even if it means at long last I can wake up alongside some white American woman. Won’t do me any good if she’s laying there roasted, now, will it, since then she’d be just as black as I am? Everybody knows a nigger ain’t got nothing on his mind but banging some white woman, so what good is a white woman who’s black? And besides, what good is a colored man who’s dead?

Now, that’s the thing, Jason. That’s the little clause there. That’s the fine print, man. You ain’t giving me nothing, don’t you see? You saying to me, man, come on, in the morning you going to be equal with everybody in the entire world, everybody gonna be black like you. Only trouble is everybody also gonna be dead like you. But never mind that, you want liberty and equality, don’t you, man?

Jason, I want liberty and equality.

My mother used to say, Amos, you got to go to college. I used to say, Yes, Mom. She used to say, Amos, you got to better yourself. I used to say, Yes, Mom. She used to tell me, Amos, this a white world and you got to prepare yourself for it, you got to work hard, you got to study, you got to be somebody.

I used to say, Yes, Mom.

Someday, Jason, I’m gonna stop hating white men, and I’m gonna stop hating white niggers like Harry, maybe someday. But being dead ain’t the way to do it. When I’m dead, it’ll be too late to stop hating, and too late to begin loving, it’ll be too goddamn late.

I wish I could stop you, Amos thought.

I wish I was somebody.

Traitors, Tannenbaum thought; they are traitors.

They have come here to murder reason; we cannot let them do it. They have come here to make a war, God forbid; we cannot let them do it. Here in this room, we must stop them before it is too late. Here in this room, these people, we must rise up and stop them.

In Nazi Germany they did not rise up until it was too late. Now, in the town where my father was born, there are only seventeen Jews. Half of them are very old men who are dying. The Jews of the world are all either dead or dying because no one stood up, no one got up on his own two feet to say, Stop! Enough! You cannot do this to us!

Someone in this room will stop them, Tannenbaum thought.

Slowly and with an almost painful scrutiny, Tannenbaum studied the faces of his allies. These are the people who will have to do it somehow, he thought. We are the sentries. We are standing here without guns, but it is us who will either stop Jason Trench or allow him to turn loose a terrible thing.

I am very happy here, Tannenbaum thought. I like this town, I like the sunshine here, I enjoy my life here. Why did Jason Trench have to come to us?

Someone in this room will stop him, Tannenbaum thought.

Someone will rise and

No, he thought.

His brow lowered.

No one will stop him because everyone will be waiting for someone else to stop him. It will be the Jews all over again. Only this time the entire world could be an oven.

Unless.

Unless I, Herbert Tannenbaum, stand up.

But I have a bad heart, he thought.

“What we shoulda done,” Red Canaday said, “was stop back there in Marathon. That’s what we shoulda done.”

“We’ll see something,” Felix Potter said. “Don’t worry.”

“You didn’t wanna stop in Tavernier, you didn’t wanna stop in Islamorada, you didn’t wanna stop in Marathon. Now I’ll bet there ain’t gonna be nothing till we get down to Key West. How much you want to bet?”

“There’ll be something,” Felix said.

“What time is it?” Red asked.

Felix took his left hand from the wheel and looked at his wrist. “Four-twenty.”

“I’m starving,” Red said.

“You had lunch in Miami.”

“That was in Miami. And that was a long time ago.”

“It wasn’t so long ago. You just got a tapeworm, that’s all.”

“Sitting in a truck all day makes me hungry.”

“We’ll see something, don’t worry,” Felix said.

The truck rumbled westward, a huge 25,000-pound Diesel with silvered sides and a green cab. It seemed to occupy almost all of the road as it crossed the Seven Mile Bridge and then came onto Little Duck Key, continuing west to Missouri Key and then crossing the short bridge that led to Ohio Key.

“There you go,” Felix said.

“What?”

“Didn’t you see the sign there?”

“Yeah, it said Ohio Key.”

“The one next to it, the one next to it.”

“What’d it say?” Red asked.

“It said you’re gonna be eating soon.”

“What do you mean?”

“It said there’s a diner just ahead.”

I need a drink, Bobby Colmore thought.

He tried to understand why Marvin had taken the bottle of thinner from the shelf and put it behind the bench. He realized that he was the only person in the room who had seen Marvin grab the bottle — everyone else had been watching Cummings — and he wondered now if his observation hadn’t been something more than chance, something like divine providence. Surely there was no one else in the shop to whom the thinner meant anything. Surely he was the only person to whom the thinner represented something more than a fluid to mix with paint. But if that was the case, what was Marvin’s interest in it?

He studied Marvin owlishly.

He did not look like a drinker, but sometimes you couldn’t tell about a man. Sometimes a man looked like a banker or a real estate agent, and it turned out he was really nothing but a sodden bum like all the others. There had been a guy in Boston whom everybody called the Preacher because he was always violently exhorting the guys to drop the booze and live a life of clean underwear and white sheets. But they had found the Preacher dead in Scollay Square one morning and everybody decided he’d been drinking wood alcohol. So you couldn’t tell about a man. And if the doctor’s son wasn’t a drinker, then why had he snatched that half-gallon bottle of thinner? What could he possibly hope to do with it, if not drink it?

So you’re a boozer, huh? Bobby thought. Shake hands, pal, only don’t try to grab it all for yourself, huh? There’s a second bottle right there on the shelf, and that’s for me, okay? You keep what you’ve got, but leave one for me, okay? Leave some for little old Bobby. Or are you trying to keep it from me, is that it? Are you afraid I’ll get obnoxiously drunk and dangerous? Are you afraid I’ll curse in front of the ladies and vomit in front of the men and cause God knows what kind of trouble with those two hoodlums and their rifles, trouble that would put your precious little hide in danger? Don’t worry, buddy.

Those men are going to start a war tomorrow morning.

Don’t worry about what little trouble I can cause.

All I want is a lousy drink. That’s all I’ve wanted since as long as I can remember. And not you or anyone else.

Marvin suddenly moved into action.

14

The cap was off the bottle; he had unscrewed the cap cautiously and slowly. The cigarette was between his lips, the lighter was in his right hand, his thumb was on the wheel. His left hand was dangling behind the bench, hovering over the top of the bottle. Harry had his back to him. Clyde was just turning away. This was the time, now!

His left hand hit the half-gallon bottle, knocking it over. His right hand thumbed the lighter into flame. The colorless fluid ran from the neck of the bottle and onto the wooden floor — God, don’t let it be water, Marvin thought. Harry turned sharply and abruptly. The liquid was spreading; it ran from the neck of the bottle in a thin rapid stream, racing across the center of the shop. “What the hell?” Harry said, and Marvin dropped the flaming lighter into it. He reared back at once because the fluid at his feet went up in flames and backed into the bottle, which exploded under the bench sending flying glass fragments scattering like pieces of a hand grenade. The trail of flame shot across the length of the room, almost touching the oil cans where Amos and Selma were sitting. Harry was standing in the middle of the room, his mouth hanging open in surprise as the flame shot past him. Clyde whipped around with his rifle waist-high, ready to shoot somebody. Marvin was off the bench. He whirled toward the shelves. The second bottle was in his hands.

“Don’t!” Bobby shouted, and he came off the packing crate to run toward Marvin who was lifting the second bottle over his head, ready to throw it. He caught Marvin’s wrist in both his hands, struggling to loosen the second bottle of thinner from his grip. Marvin, like a quarterback trying to get off a pass against strong opposition, backed away from Bobby and collided with the wall and then rolled away from him and realized he could not get past him; this damn alcoholic fool was going to spoil everything! Costigan was on his feet and shouting, Marvin couldn’t understand what. He saw his father rising, saw his father standing up, saw his father coming across the room to pull at Bobby’s arm, to try to yank Bobby away from him so he could throw the bottle. The three men struggled grotesquely and silently for perhaps thirty seconds, with Costigan shouting and Marvin not understanding him, knowing only that he wanted to throw the bottle across the shop, but being unable to do so because Bobby was clinging to his wrist even though his father was trying to break the grip. He realized all at once what it was that Costigan was shouting to him, and he let the bottle drop into Costigan’s hands where they were outstretched and waiting, entreating patiently for the bottle while Bobby and his father struggled. A shot rang out. He saw his father stumbling backward clutching his chest, and wondered if he had been hit with a bullet, and then realized the bullet had hit not his father but himself, and it was only then that he felt pain. Costigan threw the bottle. The bottle crashed into the flames on the other side of the room near the open packing crate brimming with excelsior. Liquid fire went up and onto the crate and into the excelsior, ignited the gasoline in the cans near the wall. There was an explosion, and suddenly the entire shop was ablaze.

Marvin dropped to his knees, clutching his bleeding chest.

There was another shot.

And another.

Sondra saw the flames from the bedroom window of the Westerfield house. For a moment she did not know what to do. She felt only panic because she knew that Rog had said he was going to take a look around, and now there was a fire someplace in the town.

She stood at the window motionless for several seconds, her breath coming fast, and then she bit her lip and moved swiftly to the telephone. She was about to pick up the receiver and dial the operator when she saw the list of numbers Myron Westerfield had left beside the phone. The second number on the list was for the fire department on Big Pine Key.

Quickly, she began dialing.

The moment Luke threw open the overhead doors, the ocean wind fanned the flames across the shop floor, sent them rushing up the tool-hung pegboard wall to lick at the ceiling timbers. Harry was running to the fire extinguisher on the wall near the bathroom door. Clyde was backing away from the flames, firing his rifle in panic, as though he could stop the blaze that way. Luke grabbed Samantha’s hand and pulled her through the opening, fairly yanking her off her feet. Behind him he heard two more shots as Clyde fired again. His feet dug into the sand.

“Luke...”

“Run!” he shouted.

He had made his bid for escape, and now he lay on the floor of the shop with a bullet in his chest and a searing pain flaring across his shoulders and down his arms. Harry was shouting something to Clyde. There was the sound of running feet now, men arriving. “Give me a hand here!” Harry was yelling. “We need some water, some more extinguishers!”

“Marvin,” she said. She was leaning over him. He could not see her face clearly because his glasses had dropped from his nose when he fell. He looked up at her and winced again at the pain in his chest, and he thought, I almost made it, I almost escaped.

“Marvin,” she said, “are you all right?”

“Leave me alone,” he said.

“Marvin...”

“For God’s sake, leave me alone!” he shouted. “Can’t you even let me the in peace?”

“I love you,” she said. “Marvin, I love you.”

That’s fine, he thought. She loves me. That makes everything just fine and dandy. Love will conquer all. Love will take away this burning pain in my chest, love will foil the plot of Jason Trench, love will save the world and the human race.

I’ve got news for you, he thought, and then his head fell back and his eyes rolled up into his forehead sightlessly.

“He’s dead,” Selma said to no one.

She felt almost relieved.

Jason’s men were running up from the dock, and Luke’s first instinct was to drag Samantha in the opposite direction, toward the Tannenbaum house at the western end of S-811. He remembered then that these men were armed and that anyone running away from the shop would be immediately suspect and would probably draw fire. For a reckless moment he considered running directly into the midst of the advancing men, shouting orders at them, telling them what was needed at the burning shop, giving force and direction to a mindless moving body of men who were responding only to the immediate threat and presence of fire. Samantha, he thought. They might accept me as one of their band, but if they see a woman, no. The beach. “This way,” he whispered, and his hand tightened on hers as he turned and ran onto the coral leading to the oceanfront. He had no clear idea of what he would do next. The important thing for the moment was to escape being seen by the men who were running up from the dock toward the paint shop. It seemed to him that the best way to do this was to get over the coral to where it dropped down to the beach, and then double back toward the dock. He had no plan beyond that, no scheme, not even a very clear idea of what might happen to them if they were caught. He had a vague notion that they would be killed, yes, but death seemed unreal in the same way Jason’s invasion of the town seemed unreal, in the same way Jason’s proposed suicide mission seemed unreal, in the same way everything that had happened since sunrise this morning seemed unreal. He could not muster fear, he could not allow himself the luxury of an emotional involvement, because the basic thread of Jason’s plan seemed intellectual in concept, reducing even the fear of death to an abstract idea rather than a reality that might overcome them within the next few minutes. His hand holding Samantha’s was not sweating. His heart pounded only with the exertion of their wild scramble over the coral and onto the sand; he felt no fear. He knew they had to get away, had to get out of town to warn the authorities, but he didn’t know which authorities he should warn — the police, the Coast Guard, the Army, who? He felt almost dismally certain that they would never get out of town alive, but he felt no fear. Jason’s men were in the diner at the eastern end of the road, and the diner commanded a view of the entrance to U.S. 1 as well as the thicket across S-811, so that was out. But if he and Sam ran up the beach toward the Tannenbaum house, they might possibly be spotted by the men fighting the fire at the paint shop, where the coral shelf was lower and the beach clearly visible. And even if they got past the shop, there were Jason’s men in houses all along the beach; any one of them was a potential danger. No, the dock was the place to go, and he headed for it only as a refuge at first, seeing the long empty wooden length of it, and the white Chris-Craft sitting at the pier’s end, Joel Dodge’s boat, and then realizing that the boat was a means of escape, and suddenly conceiving a plan.

Samantha responded to the slight pressure of his hand as though he were whispering instructions through his fingers.

They came up off the beach and onto the dock, using the steps at the western end, and then moving onto the planking, Samantha’s sneakers making a slight squeaking sound as they ran toward the Chris-Craft — it was funny how he heard the sound of her sneakers, expecting a bullet in the back at any moment — and then miraculously climbing aboard the boat unharmed and ducking into the cabin. “Get below,” he said to her, and automatically reached for the key in the boat’s ignition. His hand almost closed on air; his hand almost did a classic take, grasping for the key, finding nothing in the ignition slot. And then he tried to remember whether the key was hanging on the keyboard in the repair shop or whether — wait, hadn’t Jason been using this boat? Of course he had; it had been out on the water alongside the cutter not more than.

Then the key was up on the command bridge.

Samantha had gone down the two steps leading to the galley, and she turned now and looked up at him and whispered, “What is it?”

“The key,” he said. “I’ve got to go topside.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No. Stay below. If the key’s up there, I’m going to start the boat and head out.”

“You’ll need me to cast off.”

“There’s only a single line on her.”

“Stiff.”

They stared at each other for a moment.

“All right,” Luke said. “Come.”

They were moving out of the cabin when they heard the footsteps at the far end of the dock.

“What—”

“Shhh.”

They stood breathlessly in the boat’s cockpit, waiting, listening to the sound of heavy boots on the wooden planking. The man would be armed; there was no question about that. If they tried for the bridge now — no, their only hope was that he would pass the boat by.

Luke said nothing. Again his fingers touched hers lightly, and he guided her below, past the galley and the dinette and into the forward stateroom where the sleeping berths angled into a V shape, one wing of the V on either side of the bow. Luke closed the door and then opened it again a crack, listening. The footsteps on the pier were closer. He listened.

The footsteps stopped.

Beside him, Samantha caught her breath. He pressed her hand reassuringly. He waited.

The boat moved only slightly, there was only the faintest creaking of timber, but Luke knew the man had stepped aboard. He quickly closed the door, and turned and looked directly into Samantha’s face. Her expression was one of trapped horror, the eyes wide, the nostrils flaring, the lips slightly parted over clenched teeth. He suddenly wondered if the same expression was on his face. He heard heavy footsteps on the vinyl cockpit deck aft and above. The stateroom was perhaps eight feet across at the widest point of the V, with a narrow two feet of deck space between the berths. There was little more than six feet of headroom, and the apex of the V was no more than two feet wide with a curtained narrow locker pointing into the bow and with two larger lockers running beneath the berths, one on either side of the boat, the length of the berths.

There was nowhere else to hide.

He pushed open the sliding door on the locker below the berth on the starboard side. Samantha did not say a word. She dropped to her knees and crawled into the narrow space, utilizing a curiously awkward half-sliding motion, getting in headfirst and then pulling her knees up, and unfolding her legs only when she was completely inside the locker.

“Okay?” Luke whispered.

“Yes,” she whispered back.

“I’m going to slide the door shut,” Luke whispered. “Don’t move from where you are, and don’t say another word until I open it again. Have you got that?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Good. I’ll be here. Don’t be frightened.”

He slid the door shut and then turned rapidly to the port side of the stateroom. He heard footsteps on the ladder leading below. He slid open the locker door quickly, and then tried the same crawling, sliding technique Samantha had used, but discovered his legs were too long; he could not pull his knees up. The footsteps were in the galley now. He came out of the locker and tried the opposite approach, putting his legs in first, bending them at the knee as he lay on one side and then hoisting his behind up over the sill and rolling over onto his shoulder as the footsteps hesitated just outside the closed stateroom door. Ducking his head, he was entirely inside the narrow locker now. He put his palm flat against the inside of the sliding door and prayed it would not squeak when he closed it.

He pushed it closed in one swift movement not an instant before the door to the stateroom opened.

In the darkness, lying with his arms folded across his chest and his legs cramped against either side of the locker, he closed his eyes and waited.

In a little while he heard the stateroom door open and close again. Someone greeted the man just outside the stateroom. They laughed and began talking. He could not hear their words clearly. He kept listening.

The men were not leaving the boat.

The volunteer firemen from Big Pine Key, twenty-five men in two modern fire engines, arrived on Ocho Puertos within five minutes after Sondra Lasky had telephoned. They made a screeching right turn onto S-811, almost knocking over the barricade at the mouth of the road. Danny Latham, the fire chief, swung down from the cab of the first engine, swore under his breath and yelled for a man to help him clear the road. They hopped back into the trucks as soon as they had moved the obstruction, and then rolled into the town, directly to Costigan’s Marina, where smoke was still billowing up from the paint shop.

“How’d this get started?” Latham asked a colored fellow who was trying to fight the blaze, along with six or seven other men in dungaree trousers and chambray shirts.

“We’re Coast Guard,” the colored fellow answered. “Checking the boats here at the marina because of that hurricane.”

“Oh yeah, I see,” Latham said. “How’d the fire start?”

“Somebody smoking there in the paint shop,” the colored fellow said.

“Well, we’ll have it out for you in no time,” Latham said. He glanced around and then asked, “Where’s Luke?”

“He was with the skipper last I seen him. Taking care of the boats.”

“You really think this hurricane’s gonna hit?” Latham said.

“We’ll know better when we get the next advisory,” the colored fellow said.

“When’ll that be?”

“Five o’clock.”

“Yeah,” Latham said. “Get that hose in there!” he shouted to one of his men. “My name’s Latham,” he told the colored fellow, “Danny Latham.” He extended his hand.

“Harry Barnes,” the colored fellow answered, and shook his hand.

In five minutes’ time, the fire was out.

Latham’s men hosed down the shop once again, and then packed their gear. A Coast Guard officer named Jason Trench came over to thank Latham for his assistance, and promised to personally deliver Latham’s good wishes to Luke Costigan as soon as he returned from the cove where he was mooring some boats.

The fire engines left at four thirty-four.

“Well, this is Ocho Puertos,” Red said.

Felix slowed the truck at the side of the road. “This is it, all right. Where do you suppose the diner is?”

“Search me. Must be in there someplace.” He gestured with his head.

“The sign there says the road’s closed for repairs.”

“We can always walk in,” Red said.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“What do you say?”

“I don’t know.”

“You want to or not?”

“Leave the truck up here, you mean? On the highway?”

“Sure, what’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. You want to?”

“What do you say?”

“If you want to, I’m game.”

“Okay, so let’s.”

They got out of the cab and were starting across the highway when they saw the police car approaching from the west.

“Cops,” Red said.

“Yeah,” Felix answered.

The two men crossed the road and stopped near the barricade, watching the patrol car as it approached. The car slowed, and then came to a stop beside them. The door closest to the edge of the road opened. A state trooper got out of the car.

“Afternoon,” he said.

“Afternoon,” Red answered.

“Afternoon,” Felix said.

“That your truck?” the trooper asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“What are you doing walking out here on the highway?”

“Going to the diner,” Red said. “The road’s closed for repairs, so we figured we’d walk in.”

“That right?” the trooper said, and he glanced at the FLORIDA STATE ROAD DEPARTMENT barricade and the ROAD CLOSED FOR REPAIRS sign. “Where you bound?”

“Key West.”

“Where in Key West?”

“A & L Furniture,” Red said. “We’ve got a truckload of outdoor stuff for them. Wrought-iron. You know.”

“You been to Big Pine today?”

“Where’s that?”

“Down the road a ways.”

“No, we just came from Miami. Never made this run before.”

“Who’s driving?” the trooper asked.

“I am,” Felix said.

“Let’s see your license.”

Felix handed it to him, and the trooper studied it carefully. “Looks okay,” he said, and handed it back. “You plan on leaving the truck right where it is?”

“I tried to get it as far off the road as I could. That’s a soft shoulder on the side there, isn’t it?”

“I just don’t want you blocking traffic,” the trooper said.

“You want me to move it over a bit?”

“Well, I guess it’s okay where it is,” the trooper said. “You smell smoke?” he asked, and sniffed the air.

“Yeah, there must’ve been a fire,” Red said.

“Maybe the road gang’s burning something,” the trooper said. He walked to the barricade and moved it aside. “Okay, Jim,” he called to the car, and the trooper behind the wheel turned in onto S-811. “You fellows want a lift to the diner,” the first trooper said, “we’ll be happy to drop you.”

“Thanks,” Red said, and all three men got into the car, the trooper up front with his buddy, and the truck drivers in back.

“What’s this back here?” Red asked conversationally.

“Oh, a riot gun,” one of the troopers said.

“Bet you don’t get many of those down this way.”

“Many of what?”

“Riots.”

“No, not too many.” The trooper paused. “There’s the diner, Jim. Why don’t you just pull up and I’ll step inside.”

“Okay,” the driver said.

“Looks like it’s closed,” Red said.

“Shouldn’t be,” the trooper behind the wheel answered.

“Yep, it’s closed all right,” Felix said. “Sign hanging right there on the door.”

“Truck parked in back, though,” the first trooper said. “Must be some body in there to take delivery.” He paused and said, “Jim, why don’t you drive up to the marina? Maybe Costigan knows why it’s closed.”

The patrol car moved slowly up the road toward the marina office. In the distance they could hear a telephone ringing, and then the sound stopped abruptly.

“Must be somebody at the marina, anyway,” the first trooper said.

“How come?”

“Just answered the phone, didn’t they?” The first trooper paused. “I don’t see any work gang on the road, do you?”

“Nope. Just ’cause they closed the road don’t mean they’re working. Not on a Sunday, leastways.”

“Lester usually opens that diner of his every day of the week, don’t he?”

“Yep.”

“Today a holiday or something?”

“Not that I know of. Maybe he kept closed ’cause of the hurricane.”

“Yeah, that’s a point.”

“You know any place we can get some coffee and pie before Key West?” Oscar asked.

“Lots of places on Big Pine.”

“How far’s that?”

“Oh, no more’n three, four miles.”

“That’s not so bad, Red.”

“No, that’s fine,” Red said.

“Lots of cars in town today,” the first trooper said. “Seems like almost every house on the beach has company.”

“Yeah.”

“You want to pull up here, Jim?”

The patrol car came to a stop before the marina office. The trooper opened the door on his side. “I won’t be long,” he said to his partner behind the wheel, and then went up the walk to the front door. He opened the door and stepped inside.

Bobby Colmore was sitting behind the desk. A stranger was sitting beside him. There was a jacket thrown over his lap.

“Hi, Bobby,” the trooper said. “Where’s Luke?”

“Out moving some boats.”

“Everything okay here?”

“Fine,” Bobby said.

The trooper kept looking at the stranger.

“Howdy,” the stranger said.

“Hi,” the trooper answered.

“This here’s a friend of Luke’s,” Bobby said.

“How do you do?” the stranger said, smiling. “My name’s Benny Prager.” He extended his hand, but he did not rise from his position next to Bobby.

“How are you?” the trooper said, and shook hands.

“Luke said I ever needed a boat, I should stop by,” Prager said. He grinned. “I finally took him up on it.”

“You picked a fine time,” the trooper said. “Hurricane’s supposed to be coming this way.”

“Well, maybe it won’t,” Prager said.

“Maybe not. Bobby, when’s Luke gonna be back, do you know?”

“Well, that’s hard to say. He’s moving boats.”

“Up the cove?”

“Yep.”

“Maybe I can catch him there,” the trooper said.

“Maybe,” Bobby answered.

“Couple of state policemen got killed on Big Pine,” the trooper said.

“What?” Bobby said.

“Yeah,” the trooper answered.

“Gee, that’s too bad,” Prager said.

“Yeah. You didn’t see anybody suspicious hanging around town, did you?”

“No,” Bobby said.

“Well, keep your eyes open, huh? You see or hear anything funny, just give us a ring. You’ve got the number?”

“Yeah, it’s stuck to the phone there.”

“Good,” the trooper said. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Jaeger.”

“Prager.”

“Right, Prager. Which way you gonna be heading?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“With the boat.”

“Oh. Key West. I’m supposed to pick up some friends there.”

“Watch out for Flora,” the trooper said, and laughed.

“I’m hoping she’ll blow out in the other direction.”

“Next advisory should tell you,” the trooper said. “You just come down?”

“Yep, from Miami.”

“How’s it up that way?”

“Well, pretty windy this morning.”

“That’s all them Jews yakking it up there on the beach,” the trooper said, and laughed. “That’s what causes the wind.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Prager said, and laughed with him.

“Well, I’ll see you, Bobby,” the trooper said, and went to the door. At the door he paused and turned. “Diner’s closed, you know,” he said.

“Is it?”

“Yeah. Lester sick or something?”

“Not that I know of,” Bobby said.

“Must be taking the day off, then.”

“Maybe.”

“Mmm,” the trooper said. “Do you smell smoke, or is it just me?”

“We had a little fire over in the paint shop,” Bobby said.

“Oh, no wonder.”

“Firemen just left a little while ago.”

“Oh. Anybody hurt?”

“No, they put it out all right.”

“Oh. Well, good. Good.” The trooper put his hand on the doorknob. “Tell Luke I was by,” he said.

“See you,” Benny Prager said.

“Right,” the trooper answered. He opened the door and stepped outside. The door closed behind him. Bobby Colmore and Benny Prager sat behind the desk motionless. Outside, they heard the patrol car starting. They heard tires pulling at the road. The sound of the car’s engine moved into the distance. They listened until it was out of earshot.

“That was very good, Mr. Colmore,” Benny said, and he pulled the gun from beneath the jacket on his lap. He rose swiftly and walked to the door at the rear of the office. He knocked on the door three times. The door opened.

“Are they gone?” Jason asked.

“They’re gone,” Benny said. “Good thing Johnny called from the diner.”

“Bring the wino back here with Tannenbaum and the others,” Jason said.

At four forty-five, Harry Barnes went to the marina office and discovered that neither Luke Costigan nor Samantha Watts was among the prisoners in the back room. He told Jason that they had both run out of the paint shop during the fire, and that he had automatically assumed they had been recaptured. Jason said he was a fool for automatically assuming anything, and Harry apologized and said he’d had his hands full with the fire, you know, and the volunteer firemen from Big Pine, and Jason said, All right, all right, let’s search the town.

In the room behind Bobby Colmore’s shop they found Willy in bed with a woman. Both Willy and the woman were naked and unconscious, and the room stank of alcohol. Jason posted a guard outside the door with instructions to shoot them if they tried to get out. They searched the town from end to end, house to house, from mangrove jungle to beachfront. They went aboard every boat at the pier, including the white Chris-Craft. Alex Witten and Clay Prentiss were sitting below in the dinette booth, quietly talking.

“Anyone come aboard here?” Jason asked.

“Nope,” Clay answered.

“Okay,” Jason said, and he and Benny went ashore again.

“What do you think?” Benny asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Were they in town when that patrol car was here?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then they got away,” Benny said. “They’re outside, they’re—”

“Probably,” Jason said. “Most likely.”

“Jase, they’ll call the police.”

“They haven’t yet.”

“How do you know?”

“Do you see the police here?”

“No, but...”

“If Costigan called them, they’d have been back by now.”

“Maybe he hasn’t gotten to a phone yet.”

“Big Pine’s only a few miles away.”

“Still...”

“I’m not worried. I can’t worry about it.”

“Jason, if he gets to the police—”

“I can’t worry about it.”

“Jason, you have to.”

“This country is going to declare war against Cuba,” Jason said. His voice was very low, his eyes serious. “We are going to declare war as soon as the full impact of what happens out there in the Caribbean” — he pointed out over the water — “has had a chance to register.”

“Jason, what’s that got to do—”

“I can’t worry about Costigan. I can’t worry about a cripple roaming the highway. What do you think’ll happen if the police do get here, Benny? Tell me that.”

“Well, Jase, they’ll—”

“Benny, the men who stay behind here have orders to kill everyone in this town before they leave. They’ll do it. They’ll do it unless they know for certain we’ve failed out there, unless they know the plan has gone wrong. In that case, they’ll clear out fast. It’s as simple as that. Do you understand me, Benny?”

“Yes, but—”

“But, Benny, they are ready to kill everyone in this town. They are expecting to kill everyone in this town.”

“I know.” He looked at Jason curiously. “I know, Jase.”

“If anything happens here after we’re under way, they’ll do it sooner, that’s all. They won’t risk the plan, Benny.”

Benny shook his head. He still seemed troubled.

“Don’t worry,” Jason said. “The only thing that can possibly stop us is Flora.” He looked at his watch. “We’ll know what she’s going to do in ten minutes’ time.”

“Well,” Benny said dubiously, and then nodded and began nibbling at the inside of his mouth.

At five minutes to five, the radioman Peters went out to talk to Mr. Bordigian, the lieutenant j.g. who was the watch officer. He handed him the afternoon message from the Mercury and said, “What do you make of this, sir?”

Bordigian read the message, and then looked up at Peters. “What do I make of what?” he asked.

“The ZUG, sir.”

“The ZUG?” Bordigian looked at the message again. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah.”

“Kind of funny, isn’t it, sir?”

“Mmm,” Bordigian said. “Yeah.”

“What do you think we ought to do, sir?”

“Do?” Bordigian said. He scratched his head, looked at the message again, and then said, “File it, Peters. Somebody goofed, that’s all.”

MIAMI WEATHER BUREAU ADVISORY NUMBER 33 HURRICANE FLORA 5 PM EST SUNDAY OCTOBER 6.

RESIDENTS IN THE SOUTHEASTERN BAHAMAS SHOULD TAKE ALL POSSIBLE EMERGENCY PRECAUTIONS IMMEDIATELY AGAINST HURRICANE WINDS HIGH TIDES AND ROUGH SEAS.

AT 5 PM EST... 2200 ZULU.. THE CENTER OF HURRICANE FLORA WAS ESTIMATED TO BE NEAR LATITUDE 21.1 NORTH LONGITUDE 75.7 WEST AND PASSING INTO THE ATLANTIC NEAR CAPE LUCRECIA. THIS POSITION IS ABOUT 80 STATUTE MILES NORTH NORTHWEST OF GUANTANAMO BAY AND 440 MILES SOUTHEAST OF MIAMI.

FLORA IS FORECAST TO MOVE IN A GENERAL NORTHEASTERLY DIRECTION AT AROUND 10 MPH DURING THE NEXT TWELVE HOURS. SHE WOULD APPEAR TO OFFER NO FURTHER THREAT TO EXTREME WESTERN CUBA CENTRAL AMERICA AND FLORIDA AND NO FURTHER THREAT TO THE REMAINDER OF THE EAST COAST OF THE UNITED STATES AS WELL.

15

Dusk was a long time coming.

The sky stretched from horizon to horizon and there was nothing to hide the sun in its slow descent toward the rim of water. There was a stillness to the earth as the spreading stain of sunset covered the sky, touched the sea, tipped the scattered clouds in glowing color. Close to shore the ocean was calm, unrippled, reflecting the dying sun like a mirror of molten gold.

Jason stood on the shore, a black shadow against the burning sky, and watched the end of day.

A warm breeze touched his face like a maiden’s kiss.

Out on the horizon he could see the cutter in sharp silhouette. A light winked a brief signal, and he turned away from it, not bothering to read it, and watched the sun drop slowly into the water, savoring the stillness, feeling oddly and curiously at peace.

“Jason?”

It was Annabelle’s voice, whispering into the stillness of near dusk, carrying from the pier across the coral to the beach. He turned, and nodded, and walked slowly toward the pier with the sun behind him. He could see Annabelle standing in vague sun-washed gloom near the white boat, the boat tinted gold and orange by the drowning sun, her face a blur, her silhouette softened by the fading light. He stopped beside her and took her hand, and together they turned to watch the disappearing sun, the ocean consuming it, the sky turning violently red and then purple, the red tones extinguished by the water, blue dominating the horizon, spreading, the suddenness of a single star.

“The cutter just signaled,” she whispered. “They want us.”

“Right,” he said.

Lying in the darkness beneath the port sleeping berth, Luke heard the boat starting and then felt it moving away from the pier. There were footsteps above, and then the sound of muffled voices just outside the stateroom, someone greeting the newcomer, another voice, someone laughing. He heard the footsteps moving closer to the stateroom door, an indistinct voice, and suddenly the door opened, “...right in here, honey, like I told you,” Jason’s voice said.

“But I’m not tired,” a woman’s voice said.

“I know, honey,” Jason said. “But you can lie down, anyway, can’t you? We’ll leave the door open so we can talk, okay?”

“All right,” the woman said.

Luke held his breath. The woman had undoubtedly moved into the stateroom; he could hear the shuffle of her feet not six inches from where his head rested behind the sliding door of the locker. He drew his chin back into his chest instinctively, as if certain her unseen feet would touch him momentarily, even though the sliding locker door was between them.

“You need some help there?” Jason asked.

“No, I can manage.”

Luke heard a small grunt as the woman lifted herself onto the berth. Above his head the wooden base of the berth creaked as it took her weight.

“How’s that?” Jason asked. “Comfy?”

“Yes, it’s fine. This is silly,” the woman said. “We’ll be out to the cutter in no time.”

“You need all the rest you can get,” Jason said.

“Why?” the woman answered, her voice suddenly sharp. “So I can be ready for annihilation tomorrow morning?”

There was a long silence. When Jason spoke again, it was not in answer to the woman’s question. He seemed to have turned away from her to address the third person in the cabin outside.

“How’s the skipper taking all this?” he asked.

“Not much he can do about it, Jase,” a man’s voice answered.

“Where’ve we got him?”

“Locked in his cabin. Alex had one of the boys weld some two-inch chain to the bulkhead and the door.”

“Is he having any trouble with the ship?”

“He’s got the engines warming up now. Just waiting for us to come aboard, that’s all.”

“Good,” Jason said.

“I’d better get topside, see how Clay and Benny are doing.”

“Right.”

There was another silence. Luke heard retreating footsteps. The footsteps died, but the cabin remained silent. Luke made a mental count of people aboard. There was Jason and the woman, the two named Clay and Benny who were topside, and the one who had just left to join them. Five.

“Annabelle?” Jason said.

“Mmm?”

“You want your baby to grow up in a world where he’s got to be afraid all the time?”

“Jason...”

“Is that what you want for your baby?”

“I’m doing this with you,” Annabelle said.

“I know you are.”

“Then all right.”

“What you said before isn’t all right,” Jason said.

“I meant it.”

“No, you didn’t mean it.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean or don’t mean, Jase. Tomorrow morning you’re going to blow up my unborn baby, aren’t you? Well, if that’s what you’re going to do, then I’ve got a right to—”

“If that’s all the further you can see—”

“Jason, I wish to hell you’d—”

“—just about past the tip of your nose.”

“Jason, let it alone,” Annabelle said. “Let’s not even talk about it any more.”

“If all you’re concerned about is your own personal self and your baby, well, that’s something else again. I happen to be worrying about all the other unborn babies, Annabelle, all the babies that won’t even get a chance to be born if we let the Commies—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, the hell with the Commies!”

“You’re tired,” he said gently.

“I’m not tired.”

“What you did today—”

“Jason, please leave me alone. I don’t want to know about what I did today, and I don’t want to know about what we’re going to do tomorrow. I just want to forget all about it, all right? You’re going on about this the same way you went on about...”

Annabelle stopped talking.

“About what?” Jason said.

“Nothing.”

“About the Jap whore,” Jason said.

Annabelle said nothing.

“Right? About the Jap whore, right?”

“I don’t know what she was.”

“She was a whore.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“Take my word for it.”

“I know you too well,” Annabelle said.

“She was a lying old bitch!” Jason shouted. “And anyway, what the hell has she got to do with this, would you mind telling me?”

“I don’t know.”

“You bet you don’t know.”

“I only know what you wrote me.” Annabelle paused. “And I know what the others said.”

“What others?”

“The others.” Her voice was very low.

“The newspaper, you mean? Stars and Stripes?”

Annabelle remained silent.

“That’s an Army paper. What did you expect them to say? That I was innocent?”

“Were you, Jason?”

“Yes!”

“Then why did they throw you out of the Navy?”

“Because...”

“Because the woman told the truth, Jason.”

The cabin fell silent. Luke, cramped into the space beneath the berth, heard the wood above him creak again, and knew that Annabelle had shifted her position.

“Why are you in this with me?” Jason asked suddenly.

“You’re my husband.”

“That’s no reason.”

“It’s enough reason.”

“You want to know what I think?”

“I don’t care what you think,” Annabelle said sharply. “I’m scared!”

“You’re not scared!”

“I don’t want to die. My baby...”

“The hell with your baby!”

“Jason...”

“I said the hell with your baby, you hear me? I say the hell with all babies that come from chickenshit bellies like yours! How can you talk about dying when we’ve got the whole future of the world right here in the palms of our hands, right here in these hands? You talk about dying, you little bitch? Hold up your goddamn head!”

“Jason...”

“Look at me. Hold up your head.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Hold up your head.”

From above somewhere a voice called down to Jason. He did not answer. “Jason,” the voice shouted again, “we’re coming alongside the cutter.”

“Be right with you,” Jason said.

There was a silence.

“Jason?”

Her voice was curiously soft.

“It’s because I love you,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. Because I love you.”

He wished there were no choice. He wished there were only a single possibility for action, clear and undebatable. But unfortunately, there were several courses open to him, and the decision had to be made now, immediately, before the cutter got under way.

He could wait until that happened, of course. That was one possibility. He could lie here in the close darkness of the locker below the berth and wait until he heard the cutter moving out, and then wait until he was sure it was gone, and then simply go topside and take the boat back to

Provided they had left the keys.

But even if they hadn’t

No, the boat didn’t have a radio; he had talked to Joel Dodge about putting one in, but Joel had

The other way was to go aboard the cutter and try to stop them right there; no, that was stupid.

He slid open the locker door.

He knew that the five of them had left the boat already, and he knew that it might be only a matter of minutes before the cutter got under way. But he also knew he could not risk detection, not now, and so he moved with an exaggerated caution, sliding quietly out of the locker and then stretching to his full height and trying to work the cramp out of his shoulder, and then stooping to whisper, “Samantha,” and sliding open the door of the other locker.

She was asleep.

He almost burst out laughing, and then smiled instead and put his hand gently on her shoulder and whispered again, “Samantha?”

Her eyes opened instantly. She looked into his face, startled but immediately awake. He helped her out of the locker, and she peered past him into the empty cabin and asked, “Are they gone?”

“Yes.” He hesitated. “Sam, I don’t know what to do. Should I try to board the cutter and—”

“No,” she said.

“I want to stop them.”

“Then stay here. We can get the boat back to shore and notify the police.”

He hesitated again. “What if they’ve taken the ignition keys with them?” He looked at her searchingly, wanting her to convince him that it was really much safer and much wiser to stay aboard the Chris-Craft, get back to shore somehow, put the entire matter in the hands of the police.

“You can swim,” she said.

He shook his head. “We’re too far out. I’d never make it.”

“All right, someone’ll spot us right here. You wouldn’t have to—”

“In the dark?”

“The boat’s white. We can put on our lights, and—”

“Who’ll be out on the water after dark?”

“Someone, you can’t tell, there might be...”

“There might be,” he said. “Or there might not be.”

“Luke, it’ll be hours before they get to Cuba. We can certainly—”

“Seven hours,” he said. “Eight hours at most. Honey, we could spend the night out here without being seen.”

“But in the morning...”

“The morning is too late.”

“Look...”

“What?”

“Look, we’re... look, if the keys are up there, we’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“And what if they’re not?” Luke asked.

Benny Prager stood on the main deck of the cutter with his back to the rail and looked up at the wheelhouse where Jason and Alex were preparing to get under way. Below him and behind him the white Chris-Craft bobbed gently on the water. Above him and beyond him and around him the Florida night was dusted with stars, the air was balmy.

He sucked in a deep draft of sweet night air and suddenly felt the arm circling his throat and pulling him into the shadows near the forward stack. He tried to shout, but the arm was tight around his throat, unrelenting. He tried to free himself, he clutched at the arm with his fingers, tried to claw it loose; he opened his mouth and gasped for breath, he could feel himself getting dizzy, his lungs would burst, he was being dragged toward the rail, he was being lifted, his eyes were bulging, frantically he tore at the tight iron band black reeling Jason please help don’t night star.

Harry Barnes stood on the end of the pier and watched the ship move out.

Something was bothering him.

At first he thought it was simply the fact that Jason Trench — to whom he had given his trust and his loyalty and his devotion — had left without even saying goodbye. Well, that’s a white man for you, he thought, and stopped the thought before it went any further. That was not what he’d meant; he did not want to think that way. The only reason he was in this expedition at all was because he didn’t believe in all that black man-white man garbage. He believed in a free and united world without the danger of Communism hanging over it, without the threat of nuclear extinction overshadowing everything the human race tried to do. So he certainly didn’t mean that about Jason. Jason’s being white had nothing to do with his not stopping off to say goodbye. Jason had more important things on his mind than saying goodbye to just another one of the troops.

Still, he’d have liked to say, Good luck, Jase. Do it, Jase, he’d have liked to say. Go down there, and clear them out, get rid of them, Jase, take away the danger. Do it, man.

He’d have liked to shake Jase’s hand and tell him that.

Well, maybe Jase was sore because he’d let Costigan and the girl get away. And yet he hadn’t seemed particularly sore, even when they couldn’t find them. He’d just sort of shrugged it off and.

All at once, Harry knew what was bothering him.

He suddenly remembered that Costigan and the girl had been present when Clyde shot off his mouth. They knew exactly what Jason was planning, and now they were somewhere free and clear of the town while Jason was out there on the cutter, maybe heading into Navy guns.

Oh God Almighty, Harry thought.

I should, have told him, I should have warned him.

It was too late now. The cutter was on its way.

And then Harry wondered why he hadn’t told him.

The initial memory, the initial wash of feeling that came over Jason as he stood outside the wheelhouse on the bridge of the cutter and tasted the first tingling kiss of salt on his lips, the first sensation was one of unadulterated joy, of wild soaring freedom, the memory of those golden days aboard the 832 when the entire Pacific Ocean was his, the world was his.

Nine men in the crew, including himself, and a feeling he had never known before in his life, a feeling of belonging, a feeling of being liked and respected. At the university he had waited on tables in the student cafeteria and the upperclassmen had called him “boy,” as though he were a nigger. His older brother used to send him clothes he no longer had any use for, and then he went into the Army in January of 1942, immediately after Pearl Harbor, and stopped sending anything. His name was Caleb, his name used to be Caleb, he was killed in Italy some years later. By that time Jason was in the Pacific with his own command, and he didn’t learn of his older brother’s death until two months after it happened because that was when Annabelle’s letter finally caught up with him. Alex Witten, who was exec on the 832, an ensign from New Haven, Connecticut, looked at Jason as he read the letter and then said, “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Jason said, and crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it over the side. That night he got roaring drunk on grapefruit juice and torpedo fluid. Clay Prentiss couldn’t wake him the next morning, and thought he was dead because his eyes were partially opened and he was lying on his back like a corpse.

Nine men aboard the boat, one who shot himself with a stolen Army .45 that night in Pearl when they were in drydock after that foolhardy attack on the Jap minesweep — what the hell was his name? He’d been a very thin man, a machinist’s mate second, Schroeder, Schneider, something like that. He’d gone ashore and into the head of a USO canteen and then put the barrel of the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. They’d found him with the back of his skull splattered all over the bathroom walls. One of the USO hostesses said to Jason when he went to identify the body — the face was still intact, it was only the back of the man’s head that was gone — she said to Jason, “I wish he’d picked someplace else to do it. That bathroom was freshly painted only last week.” Nine men to begin with, and then Schroeder or Schneider (which the hell was it?) killed himself in Pearl and the seaman, Phillips, asked for transfer to the U.S.S. Little, a destroyer that was later sunk by kamikazes off Okinawa. Jason often wondered if Phillips had been among the men killed that day in May of 1942. Two other men left the 832, a gunner’s mate third named Kuzinsky — who was wounded in the summer of 1944 during an air attack on the base, and who was sent home with a Purple Heart — and the replacement for Schneider or Schroeder, a man named Palucci who had two brothers killed in the battle for Cassino (where his mother was born) and who was shipped back to the States gratuitously. Five of the original crew members stayed with the 832 until the war ended, forming the fighting nucleus, providing the generating force and spirit that took all the others through the war alive. They were Jason Trench, Alex Witten, Arthur Hazlitt, Clay Prentiss, and Goody Moore.

There was nothing you couldn’t sell in Japan during the winter of 1945, and only several things you could buy. Jason Trench was an officer in the United States Navy — he had been promoted to full lieutenant by this time — and his occupation assignment was the inspection of Japanese warships for armament, radar, or other forbidden military contraband. He would go aboard each Japanese ship with a .45 strapped to his side, accompanied by Clay carrying the walkie-talkie and Goody carrying the camera. Alex would remain aboard the 832 with the rest of the crew, moving out and away from any ship they were inspecting, as a precaution against the defeated Japanese trying to capture the boat. Alex’s orders were to fire across the bow of any ship from which Clay did not radio at five-minute intervals. In all the while they were in Japan, and up to the time of the Tokyo incident, Alex never had to fire a single shot.

The 832’s home base was theoretically Sasebo, but her assignments carried her north and south throughout the Japanese islands. She ranged from Kagoshima to Tokyo, from Yokohama to Hakodate, from Fukuoka to Kushiro. Jason detested each and every port because he still considered the Japanese enemies of the United States and, consequently, personal enemies of Jason Trench. The only saving grace Japan possessed was that it didn’t cost anything to be there. Jason’s expenses ashore were usually taken care of by the cigarettes he smuggled off the boat and sold to the Japs for yen. There was something enormously satisfying about dickering with the Japanese over the price of a package of cigarettes. They were bringing the equivalent of a dollar and eighty-five cents a pack when the 832 first arrived in Sasebo, and Jason would not accept less, and often insisted on more. He enjoyed the bargaining, refusing to sell unless his price was met, knowing all the time that such transactions were illegal, but somehow feeling he was exacting a sort of tithe from the Japs by selling them cigarettes at exorbitant prices — almost as if he were continuing the war against them in this way.

He went ashore in the tiny northern town at about 2 P.M. that January day, planning only to pick up the mail at the local Army base, and not dressed for liberty, wearing gray trousers and a new foul-weather jacket upon which he had not yet stenciled his name. Technically he was out of uniform, but he found himself wandering into the town nonetheless and then found himself on a narrow side street and realized all at once that he was being followed. The man behind him was Japanese, and he stopped whenever Jason stopped and then began walking again whenever Jason did. At first Jason was alarmed. Then, as the game of pursuit continued, Jason found himself wondering if the Jap would attack him. He began looking forward to the attack. He knew unquestionably that he could kill the man without effort, and with the certain immunity of self-defense. Confidently, eagerly, he anticipated the man’s approach. When it came, Jason was so startled he burst into laughter.

“You sell coat?” the man said.

Jason’s laughter eventually subsided.

He sold the foul-weather jacket for the equivalent of a hundred and twelve dollars in American money.

By the time the thing in Tokyo happened

“Jase?”

He turned. Alex was at the wheel, his face illuminated by the binnacle light.

“Did you want to come left at Looe Key?” he asked. “We’re almost there now, Jase.”

“Left to two-zero-zero at the key,” Jason said.

“Left to two-zero-zero,” Alex repeated.

The men had come down out of the low foothills of the Sierra de los Organos range in the province of Pinar del Rio. They plodded through the same teeming rain that had inundated the island for the past four days, lashed now by a strong wind that moved the storm northward and eastward toward the Bahamas. The heavier boxes were strapped to the mules, but the men carried all the others on their backs and the rain was merciless, the wind whistled through the vegetation on either side of the muddy rutted road that led toward Cabo San Antonio and the extreme western end of the island.

There were fourteen men in all.

They were dressed protectively, most of them wearing rubberized ponchos, all of them wearing rubber boots, some of them wearing hats. They were all armed. One man carried an American burp gun, a leftover from the Bay of Pigs invasion. Occasionally one of them would slip in the treacherous mud and curse loudly in Spanish as he extricated himself from the slime. When an animal bogged down or simply refused to move, the men would patiently pull at his reins or shove at his backside, the rain beating around them, their hands working swiftly, their mouths moving with an ever-present Spanish curse.

It would be a twelve-mile hike to La Fé, where the boat was waiting.

The leader of the men was called El Feliz, which meant “The Lucky One” in Spanish. He was called El Feliz because once, back in 1958 when Batista was still in power, he had won a lottery for a hundred and twenty-five pesos on a ticket that had cost him twenty-five centavos. That was in the days when Batista was in power. El Feliz had spent part of his winnings to see a circus with a fellow named Superman who had the largest weapon on the island and who performed with two putas, mostly for the benefit of American tourists. That was in the days when Batista was in power.

El Feliz was a chunky man with powerful muscles on his back and arms and shoulders from cutting sugar cane, and with dark and wary eyes that seemed suspicious of every fluttering palm frond on either side of the road. He made no attempt to quiet his men, and yet he studied the road with darting eyes, the burp gun slung over one shoulder, his left arm stretched behind him as he tugged at the reins of one of the animals. Struggling in the mud beside him, his head ducked against the rain, was El Feliz’s friend and lieutenant, a man named Angel, who tugged at the same reins and then stopped abruptly as the mule sat in the mud. Angel turned to the mule, muttered, “Hijo de la chingada,” and then immediately walked behind it and delivered a sharp-pointed kick to the mule’s haunches. The mule changed its mind about sitting in the mud, and immediately struggled to its legs under the load of the heavy wooden box on its back. The box was covered with a tarpaulin, and the wind tore wildly at the covering. The mule almost lost its balance, and then found its footing and pushed through the mud as Angel whipped it from behind.

In Spanish, El Feliz said, “Do not force the animals. They cannot go more rapidly than the men.”

“The men go too slowly,” Angel replied.

“Too slowly for what? It will still be there on Tuesday.”

“Then I long for Tuesday,” Angel said fiercely.

16

The ship was too small.

Luke was unfamiliar with its layout, and he was certain that whichever passageway or ladder he took would lead into a nest of Jason’s men squatting on their haunches with rifles across their knees. He had circled to the fantail with Samantha, and then had come forward again until they were now back to where he had attacked Benny and dropped him over the side. A set of ladders went up on either side of the ship, and he supposed they led to the bridge, which was where he definitely did not want to go. Even moving here on the main deck was extremely dangerous; there were too many open spaces, Samantha’s blond hair caught too much starlight.

He wished he knew where the captain’s cabin was; he did not think it would be on the main deck. As he moved aft of what seemed to be some sort of deck structure behind the forward stack, he saw a companionway and a ladder leading below. He listened at the top of the steps for perhaps ten or fifteen seconds, heard no voices, and then tugged gently at Samantha’s hand and began leading her down. He stopped in the middle of the ladder because he realized he was entering the engine room and further realized there had to be men down there, undoubtedly Jason’s men, and probably some of the ship’s engineers as well. He could hear the engines pounding. From where he stood midway on the ladder, he could see clear to the other end of the compartment where a workbench and a lube-oil tank were against the bulkhead. A man with a rifle leaned against the tank. Luke put his hand flat against Samantha to stop her forward movement, and then they eased themselves up the ladder and onto the main deck again, slipping to the port side of the engine-room trunk as they heard voices approaching from aft and starboard. The voices passed into the night.

He said nothing to Samantha, but only increased the pressure on her hand tight in his, and moved aft again, circling around the stack and finding there a pair of ladders that led below. He reasoned correctly that it was impossible for the entire deck below the main deck to contain only an engine room and nothing else. There had to be sleeping compartments, there had to be mess halls and offices and storage lockers. There had to be a magazine. There had to be a place where they kept guns. He listened at the top of the ladder on the port side, again heard no voices, and again decided to chance it. He started down the ladder with Samantha behind him.

The ladder led into what obviously was a mess hall of some kind, with a long table against the port bulkhead, and a bench in front of it. There was a clock on the aft bulkhead of the compartment — the time was six thirty-five — and a door to the left of that. Luke stopped just outside the door and listened. There were no sounds coming from behind it. He grasped the knob and slowly turned it, opening the door a crack and peering into the room. There were two chairs in front of a long desk on the port bulkhead, and a pair of typewriters rested on the desktop. A small cabinet was against the aft bulkhead and alongside that a larger filing cabinet. Diagonally across the room from the entrance door, on the starboard bulkhead, there was a hanging curtain, partially open.

Luke tiptoed into the room and looked around the curtain and into the next compartment. He knew immediately that this was the wardroom. There was a transom seat angled into the corner formed by the aft and starboard bulkheads, padded, covered with either leather or a plastic facsimile. A table with several chairs around it rested inside the angle formed by the corner seat. There was a serving board and a coffee maker and a toaster and a cabinet with dishes and cups and saucers in it and a radio and a bookcase

And a telephone.

He moved to the phone where it hung on the bulkhead. A small black rectangular box was bolted below it. There were three buttons set into the face of the box. Bakelite plates beneath each button covered three small typewritten labels. The label under the first button read BRDG, which Luke assumed was the bridge. The label under the second button read ENGR, which he supposed referred to the engine room or the engineering officer. The third and last button was labeled CABN. He figured this was either an abbreviation for the “cabin” or else a misspelling of an abbreviation for the word “captain.” In either case, he didn’t see how he could lose. He didn’t know how many cabins there were aboard the cutter, but he was willing to bet the only CABN that had a direct line to the wardroom was the captain’s. He lifted the phone from its bracket.

There was a button on the handgrip. It was marked PRESS TO TALK. He looked at the labeled buttons on the bulkhead once more, pushed in the one marked CABN, caught his breath, and waited.

When the sound-powered telephone buzzed in Cates’s cabin, he looked at it in surprise and debated whether or not he should answer it. He had decided long ago that the only reason they had kept him aboard was that they had a future possible use for him, and he had further decided that he would let them kill him before he would help them with their plan, whatever the plan was.

The phone buzzed again.

No, he thought. If you want something, come in here and ask for it. Then I’ll spit in your eye and tell you to go to hell.

The phone buzzed again, insistently.

Cates looked at it.

He was being childish. The ship was in their hands. He would not help them, but neither would he behave in a manner unbefitting an officer. He lifted the phone from its bracket.

“Yes?” he said.

“Is this the captain?” the voice on the other end asked. The voice sounded cautious. He could have sworn the man was whispering.

“Who’s this?” he asked.

“Is this the captain?” the voice asked again.

“Yes. Who—”

“My name is Costigan. We’ve never met, and it doesn’t matter,” the man said. He spoke quietly and with restraint, but the words came rapidly and tensely, with an urgency that immediately demanded Cates’s full attention.

“Go on, Mr. Costigan,” he said.

“I’m in the wardroom right now, trying to keep away from the people who’ve taken this ship. They’re heading for Cuba, Captain, where they hope to involve the United States in a shooting war.”

“What?” Cates said.

“Yes, sir.”

“How—?”

“Sir, I’ll explain later, if there’s time. Right now, I need a gun.”

“The armory locker,” Cates said.

“Where?”

“Aft of the exec’s quarters. On the first deck.”

“Where’s that?”

“Where did you say you were?”

“The wardroom, I think.”

“Through the ship’s office?”

“Yes, it seemed to be that.”

“Was there a curtain over the hatch?”

“Yes.”

“All right, that’s the wardroom. Go out the way you came in, through the ship’s office, and then through the CPO’s mess, back up the ladder to the main deck. If you come forward on the main deck to... well, just aft of the gun there are two deck hatches, and then my cabin, and a hatch leading into a passageway. About midships in the passageway, you’ll see a ladder leading below... wait a minute.”

“What’s the matter?”

“The armory’s always locked. There’s a padlock on the door.”

“Who’s got the key?”

“It’s in the safe,” Cates said.

“What safe?”

“The one here. Right here in my cabin.”

It was five minutes to seven and he wasn’t back yet, and she didn’t know what to do. She stood near the window in the big old house on the beach, the house silent and gray around her, looking out over the road and to the town beyond, where she had first seen the fire and later the fire engines coming to put it out. She hadn’t supposed anything had happened to him. They had put the fire out, hadn’t they?

She wondered suddenly if he’d taken off.

Well, no, he wouldn’t do that.

No, she didn’t suppose he’d do anything like that.

Still, he’d been acting very jumpy ever since those two came to the door. What had that fellow been doing with a rifle, anyway? Even Rog said it was the rifle that bothered him — it bothers me too, I’ll tell you the truth.

Maybe I ought to take a walk across the road.

He wouldn’t just walk out on me, would he?

I don’t know. Who knows with married men? I should never have started up with him in the first place, in the snow that day, he wasn’t wearing a hat. She had thought at first his hair was white, but that was only the snow in it. He had parked the Cadillac around the corner from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, and walked in the snow to where she was standing by the bus stop, and then had just asked her right out if he could drop her someplace. She’d looked at the white hair and then realized it was only snow, and thought he was very good-looking and said, “I live in Maryland.”

“Did I ask?”

“No.”

“Let’s go,” he said.

“What’s this?” she said. “A pickup?”

“Yes.”

“Well, so it’s a pickup,” she answered, and shrugged, and went with him to where the car was parked, noticing the VIP license plate immediately.

He wouldn’t just walk out on her, would he?

And leave her here in the middle of the swamp all alone with alligators or whatever was outside, fellows coming to the door with rifles no less?

Well, she thought.

Well, gee, what am I going to do? And suddenly she laughed.

Her laughter came back to her hollowly in the empty house.

Fatboy and Rodiz were sitting in chairs near the chart table, smoking and talking in quiet voices. Rodiz said something in Spanish, and Fatboy, apparently understanding, broke into quiet laughter. Their earlier dispute about leaving the dead policemen in the automobile seemed to have been forgotten. Jason watched them from the wheelhouse, and smiled in pleasure. Everything would be all right. There was a feel to the entire operation that told him nothing could go wrong any more. He closed his eyes and felt the gentle rocking of the ship, listened to the pleasant hum of Rodiz talking in Spanish.

It started with the sale of the foul-weather jacket, for which he got what amounted to a hundred and twelve dollars in yen. He began stealing regularly after that, he didn’t know why. The 832 would pull into a Japanese port and her skipper would go ashore and visit here and there, and then the 832 would vanish for a little while and a little sugar would vanish with her, or a few machine parts, or some grapefruit juice, or some rice, all of which he would later trade in Tokyo or Yokohama for more paper money than he knew existed in the world, money that could buy saki or broads or crumby souvenirs, but not much of anything else — or so he thought, at first. He enjoyed taking money from the Japanese. He enjoyed hearing them plead, watching their eyes grow round with greed and longing, holding to his price each time, ten dollars in yen for a sack of sugar, fifty-three dollars in yen for an Army blanket he stole in Fukuoka, two hundred dollars in yen for a Jeep tire he stole in Sasebo and then smuggled ashore in a crate he said was full of souvenirs he wanted to ship back home. That was the first and only time anyone ever asked him what he was taking ashore with him. The person who asked was a new Shore Patrolman at the gate. He apologized and giggled and kept calling him “sir” afterward. “Yes, sir, sorry, sir, but I’m supposed to ask, sir. All kinds of stuff has been finding its way ashore, sir,” two hundred bucks in yen for the tire.

He counted up his money in February and discovered he had close to fifteen thousand dollars in occupation yen, which was real money to the Japs, the only money in circulation in the country, the only money that could buy fish or rice or vegetables. It seemed grossly unfair to Jason that these dirty little cockeyed brown bastards could spend the money on things they actually needed, and here he had a fortune in the stuff and all he could do was wipe his ass with it. He couldn’t cash it in for dollars because of the strict monetary regulations, and he couldn’t send it home to Annabelle to cash because it was clearly marked “Occupation,” and was about as valuable in the States as the fake money in a game of Monopoly.

Along about that time, well, maybe it was a little later, yes, it must have been early in March, he heard about a machinist’s mate who had taken apart a motor launch and was shipping it home piece by piece, the rudder, the screw, the carburetor, the whole damn thing, part by part, listing each separate part as a souvenir he was sending to his mother. Jason knew intuitively that the story was exaggerated, but the machinist’s ingenuity gave him an idea. If he couldn’t cash in his yen or send it home, why not spend it on something he could send home?

Why not spend it on something like pearls?

Kemo was a smart little whore he was shacking up with in Tokyo. It was Kemo he sounded out about maybe buying some Japanese pearls. He had already hinted to her that he was picking up a few things here and there, making a few bucks on the side by selling a few choice items to her countrymen, all of which Kemo understood perfectly because first of all she was forty-three years old, a good deal older than he at the time, and also she was a whore with a whore’s honest enjoyment of larceny. He didn’t trust her enough to tell her exactly how much he was pulling in — no sense getting her all excited, right? — but he did give her some idea of his operation, and the kind of stuff he was picking up. Like one night he told her about the fan he’d stolen in Kagoshima, right from under the eyes of the yeoman first class in the office. That was back in January. He still had to laugh when he thought about that fan. Kemo laughed, too. She always covered her mouth when she laughed. He thought that was cute as hell. Kemo knew he thought it was cute, and she did it because she knew he thought it was cute. She referred to her genitals as her “monkey.” “Monkey catch Jasonn,” she would say. “Monkey take Jasonn from Anna-burr.” Jason would laugh and tell her nobody in the world was going to take him from Annaburr, especially not an old Jap whore who lived in a bombed-out Tokyo alley. “You better be careful,” he said, “or I’ll report you to the M.P.s and MacArthur himself will come down in person and put a scarlet letter right here on your left one.”

Maybe she believed him.

Anyway, it was natural for him to sound her out about the pearls, and it was natural for her to know somebody who knew somebody — everybody in Japan always knew somebody who knew somebody, especially the whores. Especially the smart whores like Kemo.

“It coss much,” she said.

Jason said it was up to her to find some that didn’t cost much, you dig? and Kemo said she would investigate the matter. She then asked him to get out because an Army sergeant friend of hers was coming in ten minutes, and he was a very jealous man. Jason wanted to know if she had warned the sergeant that he might easily catch the clap from her, and then he left and didn’t see her again until the boat came back to Sasebo in the middle of March. He borrowed a jeep from the base and drove up to Tokyo, parking the jeep outside the makeshift tin-and-wood shack where Kemo lived, and rapping on the door and then going in to find her asleep near the small burning hibachi.

“Hey, wake up, you old whore,” he said, and nudged her with the toe of his shoe.

Kemo looked up at him with all the unveiled malevolence of a conquered people, and then came immediately awake, and smiled and told him she had made contact with someone who wanted to sell some very good pearls. She asked Jason if he understood that the pearls would be stolen pearls, which was why he was getting such a bargain on them. He hadn’t thought of it until just that minute, but it didn’t matter a damn to him whether they were stolen or what they were. So he said sure, he understood, and they made arrangements to buy a whole potful of them for the fifteen thousand dollars, more than he could have bought in the States for twice that price, good pearls, too, the real thing. He told Kemo to get more for him. He told her he’d have at least another five grand by the beginning of April, and that he wanted more pearls of the same quality. Kemo, always willing to oblige, said she would get them, and then archly asked if he was going to have them strung for Annaburr. “String this for Annaburr,” he said, and laughed and pinched her naked breast until a huge purple bruise showed near the nipple. Again the same look crossed Kemo’s face, the look she had awakened with the day he had returned to Tokyo.

Jason did not notice it.

He was beginning to realize that he would be a very rich man before he left Japan. It never occurred to him that he was selling property belonging to the United States government. Oh yes, it occurred to him; it simply never bothered him. The way he looked at it, these Jap bastards had it coming to them. Each time he sold them something, he felt as if he were gouging them, as if he were somehow taking food out of their mouths. He sold them all this worthless crap that was lying around all these bases just gathering dust, and he got yen for it, which he then used to buy the only good thing the Japs had ever come up with, their pearls. The United States government had nothing whatever to do with it. This was something personal between Jason and the Japs. He was giving it to the enemies of his country. He was doing it in his own way and in his own time, but he was giving it to them as surely as he was giving it to little Kemo in that crawling Tokyo shack, the old bitch.

On the third of April Jason returned to Sasebo from a tour of Hokkaido, where he had inspected four Japanese destroyers and seven Japanese cargo vessels, and where he had stolen and sold enough material to bring him not the five thousand dollars he had expected but the equivalent of two thousand five hundred and twenty-one dollars in yen, not bad for a short voyage. He tried to check out a jeep, but there weren’t any available, so he took a train up to Tokyo and then walked up Kemo’s street through the rows of rubble on either side of the street itself, Tokyo flattened, the shacks springing up everywhere like weeds in a vacant lot. At the far end of the street a man was building a house, working silently and rapidly in the flat afternoon light. The house was a real house and not a shack like Kemo’s. It was only half built, partially roofed over, but the sliding doors and windows were already in place, and a finished deck jutted out from the entrance door. He suddenly wondered where the man had got enough money to buy the lumber that was stacked alongside the house. He put the man out of his mind and knocked on Kemo’s door. He knew there was someone with her immediately. There was a short telltale hesitation, and then her voice came to him huskily, in Japanese, asking who was there.

“It’s me,” he said.

“Mo-men,” Kemo answered, and he heard her shuffling around inside the shack. He waited angrily. He heard her footsteps approaching the door. At last the door opened. Her face showed in the crack. Her hand was clutched into the closed front of her kimono. “Yess?” she said.

“Who’s in there with you?”

“Friend,” she answered.

“Get rid of him.”

“He good friend.”

“I’ll give you five minutes.”

“Jasonn, you verry minn,” Kemo said.

“I’ll break you and him in half, both,” Jason said. “Get him the hell out of there.”

“Oh, you so strong,” Kemo said, and grinned wickedly and closed the door. Angrily he walked away from the shack. He felt suddenly chilled. It was cold for April, with a wan pale light glowing flatly on the rubble, the stench of smoke and fish and humanity hanging on the air, the sound of the carpenter’s hammer ringing sharp and clear with each stroke. Jason lifted the collar of his jacket. He found a few scraps of wood in the gutter, carried them into the lot, lighted them with his Zippo, and made a small fire over which he squatted, warming his hands. She seemed to be taking a very long time in there, the old bitch; that was because she knew he was waiting. The flames were dying. He searched around for some more bits and pieces and then looked off to where the carpenter was working and strolled down to the end of the lot, watching for a moment. The man glanced at him apprehensively, smiling, bowing, and then turned back to his work.

“Hey,” Jason said.

The man turned, smiling again, waiting.

“You need these scraps here?” Jason asked.

The man did not understand English.

“You need this wood here?” Jason said. “These chips, do you need them? Oh, go to hell,” he said, and picked up the scraps and walked back to the fire with them.

They burned very rapidly.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon, but it seemed later because of the curious light that day, the clouds hanging in dark folds, refusing to allow the sunlight through. The hammer rings seemed to add to the feeling of coldness, each sharp biting clang reverberating on the air, carrying to where Jason squatted over the rapidly dying fire. He would need more wood. Unless she came out soon, he would need more wood. He got up and walked back to where the Japanese carpenter was working. He looked for some more scraps, but there didn’t seem to be any.

“You got any more wood you don’t need?” he asked.

The carpenter bowed and smiled.

“For the fire,” Jason said, pointing.

“Ahhh,” the Jap said. “Ahhh.”

“Have you got any?”

“Kemo,” the Jap said. “Kemo.” And he grinned.

The dumb bastard thinks I want to get laid, Jason thought. He’s giving me the phone number of the local whore. “Yeah, I know all about Kemo,” he said. “I want wood. You got some wood for me? To burn. Some junk you’re not going to use. Oh hell, what’s the sense?” He turned away from the Jap and was starting back for the dying fire when the door to Kemo’s shack opened.

He had expected her “friend” to be an American, perhaps even the sergeant he had kidded her about one time. But the man who came out of the shack was a Japanese, still wearing his uniform, his face browned and bearded, as if he had just come back from some Pacific island where he’d been holed up in a cave eating his buddies and shooting at Americans. Jason turned and walked to the neatly stacked pile of fresh lumber near the house. He picked up a long slat.

“I’m taking this,” he said, and began walking away. He very carefully avoided looking at the touching scene in the doorway of Kemo’s shack, the man bowing his little brown ass off, Kemo hanging in the doorway like a teen-ager coming home after the big Saturday night prom. He went to the fire, and he broke the wood in pieces over his knee and threw the pieces onto the waning flames. An idea, an impulse, came to him. He walked back to the house again and climbed up onto the partially finished deck where the carpenter was working.

“You building yourself a nice little house, gook?” he asked. “Get the hell out of my way.” He shoved the carpenter aside and grabbed a partially fastened slat with both hands and pulled it free from the wall. The carpenter’s eyes opened wide. Jason threw the plank off the deck and then kicked his foot through the sliding door of the house and ripped the thin dividing pieces of wood from the door frame while the carpenter stood by in helpless indecision.

“Well, what you say, you dumb bastard?” Jason shouted. “I’m tearing apart your crumby little house, how about that?” He ripped another slat free, he kicked his foot through another paper panel, the whole damn house was falling apart, cheap crap, Made in Japan, the only good thing they had was pearls. He picked up an ax from the deck and swung it fiercely, chopping at one wall and then another, splitting paper and wood, wrecking the house with a wild angry glee, and finally throwing the ax down at the feet of the shocked, trembling carpenter. He leaped off the deck and began to walk back to where Kemo was watching him from the open door of her shack. Her “friend” was gone now. He was going to give it to her, all right. If she thought what he’d just done to this house was something, then she had a little surprise coming because he was really going to give it to her.

The carpenter said something.

It might have been only a sob, because when he turned, the man was standing on the deck of the demolished house with his hands clenched tightly around the head of the hammer, both hands squeezing the head of the hammer, both hands trying to fit onto the small head of the hammer, trembling, the tears running down his face with the effort to contain his anger.

“What’d you say, pal?” Jason asked.

The man shook his head. Sobbing, trembling, he avoided Jason’s eyes.

“Did I hear you say something, pal?” Jason asked.

The man did not reply. He was shaking violently now. Behind him, Jason could hear Kemo’s approaching footsteps. He leaped onto the deck and yanked the man to him with one angry grabbing pulling motion and smashed his fist into the man’s face. The man fell to the deck and Jason kicked him in the head. Behind him he heard Kemo screaming. He whirled, jumped off the deck, and ran after her, catching her near the fire, grabbing her kimono and swinging her around, the kimono flaring wide over her naked belly and legs. He slapped her and called her a cheap little whore and then slapped her again. The fire leaped high with the flames of the dried wood he had fed to it. He kept slapping her in the light of the blaze until she dropped to her knees with blood streaming from her nose and her mouth, the kimono open. He barely realized that two Marine M.P.s had grabbed his arms and were holding him. He looked down at Kemo and said, “You don’t mess with me, honey. You don’t never mess with me.”

Kemo looked up. Through her broken teeth and her bloody lips she said in English, “You son a bitch basturr brack marker thief nogood basturr crook.” For good measure, and to ingratiate herself with the military police, she added, “Tojo nogood crap.”

The Marine colonel who searched Jason found that he was carrying two thousand five hundred and twenty-one dollars in yen.

“That’s a lot of money,” the colonel said.

“Mmm?” Jason answered.

“Where’d you get all this money?”

“I got lucky in a crap game.”

“Why’d you beat up that woman?”

“They tried to roll me.”

“Who?”

“Her and the guy working on that house. I was just strolling up the street and they jumped me.”

The colonel squeezed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, and sighed. The two M.P.s who had picked Jason up stood just inside the door of the hut, their hands clasped over their white clubs. “The woman says you’re involved in black market activities,” the colonel said. He had a flat dry voice. He sounded as if he were from the Middle West someplace.

“She’s crazy,” Jason said. “I never saw her in my life before tonight.”

“She says she knows you.”

“She’s lying.”

“She says your name is Jason Trench.” The colonel suddenly released the bridge of his nose and looked up. “Is that your name?”

Jason did not answer.

“She says you bought more than fifteen thousand dollars in stolen pearls last month, and that you were there to buy more today.”

“Where would I get that kind of money?” Jason asked.

“I don’t know.” The colonel shrugged. “Where would you get two thousand five hundred and twenty-one dollars in yen?”

“I told you. In a crap game.”

“Where?”

“Aboard the boat.”

“What boat?”

“The PT 832.”

“You the skipper?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to ask your men about that alleged crap game while we keep you here. Is that all right with you?”

“Sir...”

“Yes?”

“Sir, are you going to listen to an old Jap whore, or are you—”

“No,” the colonel said.

“Good. I was afraid—”

“What we are going to do is keep you here while we question your crew about that crap game you say took place aboard your boat. Then we’re—”

“Well, I don’t remember if it was aboard the boat. It could have been with some Army guys up in—”

“Then we’re going to ask to see your ID card and your dog tags. Maybe your name isn’t Jason Trench. Maybe that woman’s talking about somebody else.”

“My name’s Trench,” he said.

“Oh?”

“They tried to roll me. She stopped me in the street and he came up behind me, and together they tried to roll me.”

“Is that your story?”

“That’s my story.”

“We found the man on the deck of that house, Trench. He—”

“Yeah, he tried to drag me inside there.”

“I thought he jumped you in the street.”

“Well, he...”

“We had to take him to the hospital,” the colonel said. “Somebody kicked him in the head.”

“I did. He tried to roll me.”

“Yes, I know, you said so.”

“It’s the truth.”

The colonel shrugged. “Truth or not,” he said, “you’re stuck with it.”

The thing he shouldn’t have done... well, actually there were a couple of things he shouldn’t have done, but the first thing he shouldn’t have done was turn back when the Jap muttered whatever it was he’d muttered; that was plain stupid. He should have just kept walking to where Kemo was standing in the door of the shack, and grabbed her and quietly taken her back inside, that was it, no sweat, instead of losing his head like that. He shouldn’t have lied about there having been a crap game aboard the boat either, because naturally when they questioned the other men, all of them — with the exception of Arthur — had tried to protect him by saying exactly the wrong thing. A crap game? Heavens, no, we never shoot dice aboard our clean little boat, they had said, golly Moses, no, all except Arthur. Arthur had possessed the good sense to know something was in the wind, and he had picked up the lie almost as if he were carrying radar. Yes, sir, he had said, there was a very big crap game aboard the boat, there are always a lot of very big money crap games. Even so, the lie hadn’t worked. Nor had he been very smart in pretending not to know Kemo either; that was really dumb. Not only was she able to tell them his name, and his wife’s name — “Annaburr,” she said, “he send the perrs to Annaburr” — but she was also able to tell them the number of his boat and the names of several of the men aboard her; it was amazing the things a man said to a woman when he was in bed with her. He had also apparently told her about a particular escapade in Kagoshima, where he had audaciously stolen an electric fan from the desk of the yeoman first, in the office ashore, a fan he later sold for seventy-five dollars. The funny thing about this particular fan was that the yeoman had painted it pink.

Kemo didn’t understand English too well, and she spoke it pretty badly, especially when it came to naming colors. Had she described the color of that fan wrong when the court asked her about it, things might have worked out differently. But Kemo was remembering all the indignities she had suffered at the hands of Jason Trench, Kemo was remembering the bruises he had left on her breasts and thighs, remembering that he had never treated her like anything but dirt, never like a woman even when he was inside her, remembering his wife Annaburr to whom he had sent the pearls. All these things combined to make it absolutely essential that there be no mistake about the color of the fan that had been stolen in Kagoshima. Kemo lifted the hem of her kimono clear up over her thighs, showing the court a splendid pair of whore’s legs, and also showing them a nylon slip that had been given to her by her Army sergeant friend.

“This,” she said, and glared at Jason.

The slip was pink.

He always felt later that they were being particularly hard on him because he had pulled down that Jap house and beaten up Kemo. He could not understand it. Kemo and the carpenter were both enemies of the United States; what difference did it make what happened to them? But he knew that this was why they were being so hard on him. After all, he was an officer in the United States Navy, a combat officer; they didn’t have to throw the book at him that way. Oh yes, the yeoman from Kagoshima came down to testify that a pink fan had been discovered missing from the office shortly after the visit of the 832 in the second week of January, a visit confirmed by the record of harbor traffic that month. He also testified to having seen Jason in the office on at least two occasions, but all this was circumstantial since the missing pink fan was at no time offered in evidence. (How could it be? Jason had sold it to a shopkeeper in Kyoto.) It seemed to Jason, in fact, that the only few things they really had him on were the ones the Japs testified to, and he couldn’t understand why the court was willing to accept their word over his.

The charges included violation of Paragraph 187, Article 108 of the Punitive Articles, Selling or otherwise disposing of military property of the United States; that was the pink fan, all circumstantial. Then they charged him with the Wasting, despoiling or damaging of any property other than military property of the United States. That was the Jap house. The court valued the fan at between twenty dollars and fifty dollars, and the house at more than fifty dollars. In either case, the punishment — if he had been an enlisted man — could have included dishonorable discharge and forfeiture of all pay and allowances, as well as six months at hard labor for each offense. That wasn’t all, though. They charged him with two counts of assault. The assault on the Jap carpenter was called aggravated assault, because it turned out the bastard had suffered a concussion when Jason kicked him in the head. They called the assault on Kemo an assault with intent to commit rape, which couldn’t have been further from the truth but which carried a possible twenty-year sentence as opposed to six months for simple assault and battery, and five years for aggravated assault. They also added looting and pillaging to the list of offenses, because he had taken a slat of wood and tossed it on the fire, and — as an ironic fillip to the whole episode — they charged him with misbehavior before the enemy in that his intentional misconduct in the presence of Kemo and the carpenter had endangered the safety of the place (Japan) which it was his duty to defend.

According to the code, an officer could not be sentenced to a bad-conduct discharge, but he could be dismissed from the service for an offense in violation of an article of the code, and Jason was convicted of several such offenses. His dismissal included a forfeiture of all pay and allowances and immediate transfer back to the United States. Back in Louisiana, Annabelle was waiting with the pearls he had sent to her, and which he estimated to be worth about thirty-five thousand dollars.

Many years later he would use the money he received from the sale of those pearls to buy a cabin cruiser named The Golden Fleece, to rent a warehouse and a truck in Miami, to acquire automobiles and rooms in Key West, to pay for plane fares, to buy pistols and rifles to support an invasion. He thought it supremely ironic that he had taken this money from a past enemy of the United States and was now using it against a present enemy.

The sound-powered phone at his elbow buzzed. He opened his eyes and blinked at it curiously for a moment, as though his mind were still elsewhere, and then lifted it from the bulkhead bracket.

“Bridge,” he said.

“This is the captain,” the voice on the other end answered.

17

“Well, how are you, Captain?” Jason said pleasantly. “Everything all right down there?”

“I... I don’t like to ask for favors,” Cates said.

“What is it?”

“I’ve got a bad tooth,” Cates said. “It’s been...”

“Yes, what about it?” Jason said.

“We have a hospital corpsman aboard. I thought—”

“Oh, do we?”

“Yes,” Cates said, and waited.

“Did we leave the corpsman aboard?” Jason asked Alex.

Alex turned from the wheel and said, “I think so.”

“You sure he’s not ashore?”

“No, I think he’s down in the engine room with the others.”

“Tell him I’m about to have my baby,” Annabelle said, and giggled. “I want to see him go pale again.”

Jason laughed and pressed the button on the phone grip. “Captain,” he said, “we do have a corpsman aboard. What is it you want?”

“I thought he could pull this tooth,” Cates said. “I’m in pain.”

“Well, I don’t like to see a man in pain,” Jason said, and hesitated. “I’ll send somebody for the corpsman. He’ll be down there soon. Why don’t you take a swig of brandy meanwhile? You’ve got some in your safe, haven’t you?”

“I’ve already had some.”

“Don’t get loaded, Captain. We may need you later on, just in case anybody gets too curious.” Jason laughed again. “I’ll have the corpsman brought down. You just relax.”

“Thank you,” Cates said.

“Sure,” Jason answered, and hung up the phone. He turned to where Rodiz and Fatboy were seated at the chart table. “Anybody feel like taking a walk?”

“What is it?” Rodiz asked.

“Captain needs a tooth pulled. I’d like somebody to go get the corpsman and take him to the captain’s cabin.”

“I’ll go,” Fatboy said. “Where is he?”

“In the engine room.”

Fatboy stood up and stretched.

“You’ll need a key,” Alex said from the wheel. “The cabin’s locked.” He reached into his pocket and then extended his hand back to Jason, who took the key from it and passed it on to Fatboy. “What’s the corpsman’s name?” Fatboy asked.

“I don’t know. Just go down there and ask for him. Who’s down there, anyway?”

“I think Johnny and Sy.”

“Yeah, well, tell them you want the corpsman, that’s all.”

“Okay. I’ll see you,” Fatboy said, and went out through the wheelhouse door and onto the bridge deck, walking aft to the ladder that led to the main deck, climbing down, and then going past the forward stack and into the companionway and down the ladder to the engine room. There were perhaps a dozen men in the compartment, including Johnny and Sy. Sy was standing near the workbench, the butt of a rifle at his feet, his hand around the muzzle near the sight. Johnny was sitting on the bench. Both men looked up as Fatboy came down the ladder.

“Hey, how’s it going?” Fatboy said.

“Nice and quiet,” Sy answered.

“You got a hospital corpsman here?”

“Search me,” Sy said. He turned to the men who were standing near the bulkhead just forward of the starboard main engine. “Any of you guys a corpsman?” he asked.

None of the men answered. But some of them turned automatically to look at a thin young man who glanced up nervously and then tried to hide behind the man next to him.

“You the corpsman?” Fatboy asked.

The young man nodded.

“What’s your name?”

“Bunder.”

“Let’s go, Bunder.”

“Wh... wh... where? Where?” Bunder said.

“Come on,” Fatboy said, and drew his .45. Bunder glanced at the gun and nodded, and swallowed, and looked at his shipmates pleadingly. “Up the ladder,” Fatboy said. Bunder went up the ladder ahead of him. Over his shoulder Fatboy called, “Take it easy, now.”

They came out onto the main deck. The sky was sprinkled with stars, the ship moved steadily southward and westward, there was the constant hiss of rushing water against its sides. “You’ll need your kit,” Fatboy said. “Where’s sick bay?”

“In officer’s country.”

“Where’s that?”

“On the berth deck, amidships.”

“Where we just came from?”

“Well, forward of the engine room.”

“How do we get there?”

“We can take the passageway going by the captain’s cabin.”

“Good. That’s right on our way.”

“What do you mean?”

“The captain’s cabin.”

“Well, sick bay’s on the deck below.”

“That’s okay.”

They came down the starboard side of the ship. Bunder opened the hatch leading into the passageway. As they passed the captain’s cabin, he saw that two pieces of chain had been welded to the door and bulkhead, and that a padlock had been passed through them. A ladder about two feet beyond the door and across the passageway led below to the armory locker, the officers’ staterooms, and sick bay. A hatch was at the other end of the passageway. The hatch was closed.

“Down here,” Bunder said. “Listen, could you tell me where we’re going and what I’m supposed to do? So I’ll know what—”

“You’re gonna pull a tooth.”

“What?”

“Yeah, the captain’s tooth.”

“Oh, brother,” Bunder said.

“You’d better bring a pliers or something,” Fatboy said.

Bunder nodded dismally. From the surgical tools in the medicine cabinet he took a heavy forceps and a bandage scissors, and hoped they would suffice to yank the captain’s tooth. This had been the worst day of his entire life. First a pregnant woman — well, they thought she was pregnant — and then all the shooting, and now he had to pull the captain’s tooth, the tooth of a lieutenant commander in the United States Coast Guard. Wouldn’t this day ever end?

“Listen,” he said, “maybe you ought to do it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Pull the tooth.”

“He asked for you specifically.”

“The captain did?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, brother,” Bunder said, and picked up his kit. He looked up at Fatboy, and then said conversationally, “What are you guys doing, anyway?”

“None of your business,” Fatboy said.

“Oh,” Bunder said.

They went up the steps again. Bunder walked directly to the captain’s door, looked at the padlocked chain again, and then said, “This is locked.”

“I’ve got the key,” Fatboy said. “Stand aside.” He waved the gun at Bunder and reached into his pocket. Bunder backed off against the bulkhead. Fatboy fitted the key into the padlock and opened it. He was putting the key back into his pocket when he saw the look of surprise on Bunder’s face, and immediately turned. Luke Costigan was bounding through the hatch at the other end of the passageway some four feet from where they were standing, both hands clenched together and going up over his head like a sledgehammer. The element of total surprise had been totally wasted on Bunder, who still stood flat against the bulkhead alongside the door, his eyes wide, his mouth gaping as Fatboy moved forward like a boxer to meet Luke’s rush. The surprise element might have equalized the .45 in Fatboy’s hand, but Bunder had very carelessly blown Luke’s advantage, and now Luke rushed forward with both hands clasped together over his head, and then stopped dead and swung them down and sideward at Fatboy’s head just as Fatboy brought the .45 into firing position. For the first time that day, Bunder acted like a hero. He stuck out his foot just enough to catch the tip of Fatboy’s shoe, throwing him off balance. Fatboy hurtled forward clumsily as Luke’s clenched hands came around like a solid iron mace at the end of a swinging chain, colliding with Fatboy’s jaw and sending the .45 flying out of his hand and spinning down the length of the passageway. Fatboy crashed into the bulkhead and then turned, dazed, to find Luke coming at him again. Luke’s hands were bunched into separate solid fists now, and he threw one with all his strength into Fatboy’s midsection and then tried a fierce right uppercut that missed Fatboy’s jaw by inches. Fatboy was still doubled over, his arms clutching at his midsection, a sustained grunt coming from his lips in a steady urgh-urgh-urgh struggle for breath. Luke clenched his left fist and brought it down on the back of Fatboy’s neck in an angry rabbit punch that sent him sprawling to the deck. He bent over him, straddling him, caught his collar in both hands, and banged his head against the deck once, without anger. Fatboy lay still. Bunder stood against the bulkhead, his face pale, his eyes wide, his palms pressed flat to the metal, and looked at Luke as though he wondered which of the men was the lesser of the two evils.

Luke threw open the captain’s door. “Help me get him inside,” he said. “Quick!”

There were some men who claimed Virgil Cooper could see in the dark. Well, maybe he could when he was on dry land with dirt under his boots and with nothing more to worry about than just looking. He sure couldn’t see anything out there on the water, though; it was a wonder ships didn’t just go banging into each other all the time. Well, he supposed they had radar. He looked out over the rail to starboard and couldn’t see a thing but the stars in the distance and even they seemed to be hanging in total darkness, with ocean and sky blending into one, and without a man being able to tell where one started and the other began.

It was a dark night, all right, with no moon and with the ship plunging ahead without running lights into a blackness as deep as hell. It made Coop uncomfortable. It reminded him of that Korean night when the Mongolians came charging out of the darkness blowing their bugles and beating their drums. You’d think the stars would throw just a little more light than they did.

He was walking back aft near the fantail where the canvas canopy was spread like a tent. He paused for a moment to watch the small white tongues of water licking the sides of the ship, to listen to the whispering hiss of steel pushing against ocean, and then began walking forward again.

He was passing the after stack when something on the deck caught his eye. It rested just alongside the companionway and ladder leading below. He thought at first it was a cartridge someone had dropped, its brass case catching starlight and glowing feebly in the shadow of the bulkhead. He stooped to pick it up.

He held it on the palm of his hand and stared at it, puzzled.

It took him several moments to realize he was looking down at a woman’s lipstick.

They opened the door to the armory locker quickly and silently, each of the men taking a .45 and an Ml, strapping on the handguns, putting clips into the rifles and then moving swiftly into the forward stateroom on the starboard side, the exec’s cabin, and closing the door behind them. Bunder was still frightened; he had the feeling he was going to be killed; he had the feeling they were all going to be killed. He didn’t like the way the captain and this man Costigan looked at each other with hard eyes; he didn’t like the way they talked in whispers. He was a hospital corpsman; he wasn’t expected to carry a rifle and strap on a handgun. He was afraid he would get killed. They were planning their next move. He tried to listen to them, but his heart was pounding and all he could think of was that he would be killed tonight. His girl’s name was Effie. He wondered what she would say when they told her he’d been killed on a routine patrol originating out of Key West.

“Where’s the radio room?” Costigan was saying.

“Just aft of where we are now,” the captain said, “but up on the main deck.”

“Is there a lock on the door?”

“Yes.”

“Can it be locked from the inside?”

“Yes. But there should be a duplicate key right here in this cabin,” the captain said. “The executive officer has a dupe of every key aboard, except for the magazine and the armory.”

“We might need it,” Costigan said. “They may have locked themselves in there. They plan to radio back and say they’re answering an SOS about fifty miles northwest of Havana. Is that possible?”

“Yes, it’s possible,” the captain said.

“I mean, that you’d go in that close to the island?”

“Yes, that’s not too close.”

“Then Miami would believe it.”

“Yes. I would, if I were the officer on duty.” The captain paused. “Mr. Costigan,” he said, “I want to regain control of my ship.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Costigan said.

“Why not?”

“Trench has too many men aboard.”

“We’re armed now. We can—”

“I don’t want to try it.”

“This is not your ship, Mr. Costigan.”

“That’s true, Captain. But it’s not yours, either. It’s Jason Trench’s. And if we try to take it back and fail, the United States’ll be at war tomorrow morning.”

“I don’t think we’ll fail, Mr. Costigan.”

“If there’s even a chance of failure—”

“I want the ship back.”

“Captain,” Luke said, “it’s too late for this kind of crap.”

“What?”

“You shouldn’t have lost the ship in the first place. We shouldn’t have let them take the town, either. But we did, and you did, and there’s nothing to be done about it now. Except stop them.”

“That’s why I want to—”

“Captain, the only way to stop these men for sure is to go into that radio room and call Miami and tell them exactly what’s going on. That’s the only way. Miami’ll contact the Navy, and the destroyers’ll take care of the rest.”

“They won’t believe us. They’ll think someone is playing a practical joke.”

“They’ll believe us,” Costigan said. “But if they don’t, you can give them a frequency to call back on. They can check it that way.”

The captain hesitated for a long time. It seemed to Bunder that however they worked this, they were going to get killed. If they stormed the bridge or whatever it was the captain wanted to do to get control of the ship, they’d be shot down in their tracks. If they tried to get into the radio shack, wouldn’t the men in there be armed?

“Captain,” Costigan said, “I’m going ahead with this whether you’re with me or not. It’ll make it easier if you send the message. I’m not familiar with your gear, and the Miami Coast Guard doesn’t know me from a hole in the wall. But if I have to do it alone, I will. Now, where does your exec keep those duplicate keys?”

“There,” the captain said, and indicated the key locker on the bulkhead. He hesitated a moment. He sighed. “What’s your plan?” he asked. “What do we do when we get to the radio shack?”

“We’ll have to—”

Quite unexpectedly, even to himself, Bunder said aloud, “We’re all going to get killed tonight.”

It was very quiet up on the bridge. Coop didn’t know exactly what he’d expected up here, but it seemed altogether too quiet. Maybe the darkness had something to do with it. The only real light burning was the one near the wheel, and it shone up on Alex’s face and made him look kind of eerie. The other light came from the Sperry Mark 3 radar gear against the port bulkhead. Jason and Annabelle were standing near the gear, looking down at the scope in its slanted top, their faces bathed in its bluish-white electronic glow. Neither of the two was talking. As Coop approached them, he saw that they were holding hands. He grinned.

“Hey, I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he said.

“We’re watching television,” Jason said, and laughed.

“Anything good on?” Coop asked.

“Nothing. I thought maybe we’d catch Ed Sullivan. This is Sunday night, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Couldn’t you get him?”

“Nothing but a lot of junk on it,” Jason said, and turned away from the gear.

“Hey, I found something belongs to you, Annabelle.”

“Oh?” Annabelle said, and looked up.

Coop reached into his pocket and pulled out the lipstick. He handed it to Annabelle.

“Oh, thanks,” she said.

“What is it?” Jason asked.

“My lipstick,” Annabelle said.

“I found it near that ladder back aft.”

“Thanks,” Annabelle said. She paused a moment and then said, “Back aft?”

“Yeah. Behind the stack there. You know, there’s that—”

Annabelle had risen and was walking toward the binnacle. She held the lipstick on the palm of her hand, the hand extended toward the binnacle light. She was shaking her head when she turned back toward the two men.

“It’s not mine,” she said.

I love him, Samantha thought. He’ll be back any minute. He said he would come back as soon as they’d got the message off. He said to stay here and wait. I love him.

Fear crackled into her skull with every strange sound that clanged or clicked in the wardroom where she huddled in a corner of the transom seat. The curtain over the bulkhead opening was closed; he had told her to leave it closed. The wardroom was black. She had never liked the darkness. It was always a comfort to have the cats around the house, first Fang and Fong and then the others; she had not fed them this morning. The ocean rushed past on the other side of the transom seat, beyond the thick skin of the ship. She could hear its angry haste, and the sound frightened her because she knew that if Luke did not get that message off as he had promised to do, the ship would be blown apart before dawn, the rushing water outside would flood into compartments and passageways, they would drown.

I’m afraid, she thought.

Now don’t, she thought. Don’t.

The cats must be starving.

It was always so damn dark in that house on the beach, I like it with his arms around me at night.

He had held her in his arms here in the wardroom, how long ago had it been? They had stood very close to each other, the curtain drawn, the wardroom dark and silent.

“I want to come with you,” she said.

“No. You stay here. If this goes wrong—”

“If it goes wrong—”

“—I don’t want you to be...”

“—there’s nothing left.”

She could not see his face in the darkness. She could only feel his arms around her and his body tight against her, the way she had felt his arms around her and his body against her in bed with the darkness around them in the house on the beach. This could have been the house on the beach, her darkened bedroom with the jalousied windows overlooking the slate patio outside; this could have been a night like all those others that began in the back of the marina office when she’d been half drunk and he’d told her he loved her. This could have been a night just like all the others, but it was not.

There was something strange in his voice.

“I don’t know if we’re going to come out of this tonight,” he said.

The room was silent and black. His mouth was close to her ear, he was speaking in a whisper.

“The whole idea of going out there scares me. I don’t even know if it’ll work. The whole thing...”

He shook his head. She said nothing.

“I wish someone else could do this. I want to stay here in the dark and hold you in my arms and never move, never. I don’t want to go out there to ambush somebody and maybe kill him.”

She still said nothing. He was trembling now — she could feel his body shaking against her — but she said nothing and did nothing.

“I don’t want to go out there,” he said.

“I know.”

The room was silent.

“Sam?”

“Yes?”

He sighed. “I wish it didn’t have to be me.” He sighed again. “I’ll come back for you,” he said. “As soon as we get the message off, I’ll come back.”

There was another silence.

“Sam, I don’t know what there is for us.”

“I don’t either.”

“But maybe something. I love you.”

“I love you, Luke.”

“Wait for me,” he said, and was gone.

She could not see her watch in the dark. She worried about the cats and she worried about Luke and then thought perhaps she was only worrying about herself. She told herself she loved him and that he was doing a very courageous thing, going out there against a shipful of fanatics; he was a brave and responsible man. Then she told herself she hated him for leaving her alone here in the dark while he went out on a hopeless mission. They would kill him and then find her and kill her, too. He was a fool.

She wondered what time it was.

She heard something clanging someplace.

Footsteps?

She caught her breath. Someone was coming down a ladder; it sounded as if it was on her left someplace. She counted the steps down, six, seven, eight; there were footfalls on the deck now. She waited. Silence. She heard a door opening. Someone was entering the ship’s office. A light snapped on. “Anything?” a man asked. “No.” More silence. Footsteps. She knew she would faint. She struggled for breath and knew that she would faint if they pulled open the curtain. “Got to be down here someplace,” the first man said. They were right outside the curtain now. She pulled herself into a corner of the seat, small and huddled and frightened and gasping for breath, and remembered what Luke had said about wishing it could be someone else, about not wanting to ambush and maybe kill a man, about not wanting to go out there.

But he had gone.

With her breath rattling in her throat, she moved off the seat, and as she was groping in the dark along the top of the cabinet for a knife, a utensil, a glass she could break, anything she could use for a weapon, the curtain rasped back on its rod.

Light from the ship’s office flooded the wardroom.

A tall pale man with black hair looked in, smiled, and said, “Vamanos, señorita. We have something of yours on the bridge.”

They had unburdened the mules, and now the large wooden crates stood at the water’s edge, waiting to be loaded. It was still raining, and so the tarpaulins had not yet been removed from the boxes. El Feliz and his men squatted inside their ponchos around the open fire on the beach, drinking coffee and chewing cold pork. The boat was tied alongside a ramshackle dock that jutted out lopsidedly into the water. Angel looked at the boat every few seconds.

“Está tranquilo,” El Feliz advised.

“When will we load it?”

“Soon. When our meal is finished.”

“I want to get there.”

“We have two days,” El Feliz said. He grinned and spat into the sand. “If we go too rapidly, amigo, we will overtake the lady. Is that what you wish?”

“What lady?” Angel asked.

“Flora. La dama ventosa.” El Feliz laughed. “We have had enough of her, no? Let her march.” He made a shooing motion with his hands, and then wiped the rain from his face, picked up his coffee mug and held it out to one of the men. The man filled it. El Feliz drank from the mug and then glanced again at Angel, who was still looking out toward the boat. “Calm,” he said again. “Slow. Moderate yourself.”

Angel grunted sourly, and El Feliz burst out laughing. “Amigo,” he said gently and reasonably, “we cannot follow a hurricane too closely.”

“We do not have to follow it at all,” Angel said testily. “We can come south around the cape and then through the basin.”

“Past Guantanamo?”

“Not if we land on the peninsula.”

“But we will not land on the peninsula,” El Feliz said. “We will land on the northern coast.”

“The first plan was for the peninsula.”

“That was before Flora.”

“We still do not know the extent of the damage there.”

“And we do not wish to test fortune. The center of Flora crossed the peninsula. It is reasonable to assume there was at least some damage to the docks and beaches. Besides” — El Feliz shrugged — “they have already been told the landing will be in the north. The plan cannot change itself again.”

“Why did Flora have to come?” Angel asked angrily, and slapped his fist into the open palm of his other hand.

“Because she came,” El Feliz said philosophically, and again laughed. “My friend, you have all the energy, all the devotion to a cause, all the resolve of a true fanatic, but—”

“A fanatic?” Angel said, annoyed.

“Cómo no! A fanatic, yes, what did you think? But you also have the impatience of a fanatic and the stubbornness of one. More coffee,” he said, and extended his mug again. “You refuse to believe that Flora forced us to change our plans. You refuse to believe that she is still angry up there” — he pointed with his finger — “and that it could be extremely dangerous if we followed her too closely. You refuse to accept the fact that chance, and coincidence, and unforeseen accidents can force a man to alter his plans — and can sometimes change the course of history. Gracias,” El Feliz said to the man who filled his cup. He drank again. “Be patient. The boat will be loaded by nine o’clock. We are not expected until sundown Tuesday.”

“We should have loaded it at the other end of the island. We should have—”

“Again, there is Guantánamo at the other end of the island. That is a fact. Flora is a fact, Guantanamo is a fact. Accept them,” he said, and drained the remainder of the coffee from the mug. “We will leave La Fé at nine tonight. We will proceed to the northern side of the island and follow the coastline some thirty or forty miles offshore, past Havana and Matanzas, Caibarién and Cayo Romano, Puerto Manatí and Moa, all the way down past Baracoa. At our top speed, we will have need of two days to travel where we are going. But we will be moving well behind Flora and well away from the eyes of Guantánamo. Those are the facts, Angel. That is our plan.”

On the beach, the wind lashed at a tarpaulin, pulling it free from the crate it was protecting. Angel leaped to his feet and ran for the tarpaulin as it flapped into the air like a giant bat. He clasped the tarpaulin in his arms and brought it fluttering to the sand. Annoyed, he dragged it back to the crate. The wind drove the rain against the crate’s exposed raw wood as he struggled to cover it again. On the sides of the crate two stenciled Spanish words screamed a warning in bold black letters:

The trouble with hanky-panky, Sondra Lasky thought, is that you can’t complain to the hotel management if the faucet leaks.

Roger Cummings was just a human being, just a person like any other person walking the streets of Washington or anyplace else. And being only a person, he could be expected to notice a good pair of legs outside the Bureau of Printing and Engraving every day of the week except Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. Being only a person, he could be expected to eventually try a pickup. Who wouldn’t? Being a person, and also a man besides, he could naturally be expected to finally leave a girl in the lurch in the middle of a swamp infested with cottonmouths and crocodiles and probably wild naked Florida Indians with their hair in bangs.

Or maybe not.

That was where the hanky-panky came in.

Maybe Roger Cummings the person was leaving her in the lurch and maybe he wasn’t. Maybe Roger Cummings the person was really in trouble someplace, maybe he’d got hit by a truck on the highway, or bitten by a snake in the swamp, or scalped by one of those wild Indians — who could tell? Maybe Roger Cummings the person wasn’t really being a rat at all; maybe he was gasping for breath and calling her name, with one hand stuck out of the water, all covered with mud like Stewart Granger — who could tell?

But Sondra couldn’t call the management to tell them the faucet was leaking, because then she would have to say she was here with Roger Cummings, who was a United States senator. And if anybody found out that Roger Cummings the senator was maybe in trouble, wow, he would really be in trouble!

So what the hell, he was a big boy now.

If he wanted to go wandering off across the swamp into some one-horse town that was having its yearly fire, that was his business. As for her, there were plenty of things she could do with her time, instead of hanging around a Godforsaken dump on the edge of the ocean when maybe a hurricane was coming. Wasn’t that what they were saying, or was it the other way around? Was the hurricane going?

The rented car had been left in the garage by Roger. She had driven it to Key West. The NO SMOKING-FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign went on at the front of the Twin Beech. Sondra fastened her belt and then glanced in turn at the other three passengers in the small airplane, making sure they had also obeyed the sign. The pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker system. He told them at what altitude they would be flying, and he told them the temperature in Miami, and he said they would be there in fifty minutes.

At 8 P.M. the Key West tower cleared the plane for takeoff, and it taxied down the field into the wind.

They heard the plane on Ocho Puertos.

The sailors in the storage locker, the men and women in the houses along the beach and in the room behind the marina office heard the sound of the airplane and listened to it cautiously at first. The sound came from a long way off, a steady rumble that moved closer and closer. As the plane approached, they allowed themselves to hope. They had been waiting for salvation for a long time now, had been waiting since dawn for someone to deliver them, and now they heard the sound of the approaching airplane and hoped silently that it would land here on Ocho Puertos, wished desperately that it would be an amphibious Coast Guard plane that would put down on the water and rescue them.

The plane was overhead now.

Some of the people in the town dared to raise their eyes.

There was a brief moment where hope hung suspended. The sound of the plane seemed to indicate it was preparing to land, and yet at the same time seemed unchanged. The steady rumble remained unbroken. The plane droned noisily in the sky.

They listened until there was nothing more to hear.

Fang was the one who finally ripped the hole in the screen door. He had been clawing at a small tear for the better part of three hours, and now he had enlarged the hole enough to squeeze through, first his head and then his body. An odd feline shudder of triumph seemed to work down the length of his back to the tip of his tail as he crawled through the hole and onto the slate patio outside. Fong was right behind him.

They were starving.

Their mistress had not fed them, and they prowled the beach like wild scavengers now, sniffing the air, waiting to pounce on anything that seemed even barely edible, willing to eat carrion or drink blood, ready to accept sustenance from whoever or whatever offered it.

It did not take long for the other cats to discover the hole in the screen door. In five minutes’ time the beach was alive with prowling crying desperately hungry animals.

Their eyes glowed greedily in the darkness.

Luke could hear voices inside.

With the .45 in one hand, he stood with Cates and the corpsman on the main deck, just outside the hatch to the radio room, and tried to ease the door open. The door was locked.

On his right, some three feet from where they stood before the door, a ladder led to the bridge deck and the wheelhouse. The plan as they had outlined it below in the executive officer’s quarters was simple and direct, and necessitated silence and speed. The silence was imperative because the bridge was only three feet to the right, eight feet above, and sixteen feet forward of where they stood. They could not risk any shots or shouts that would bring help from the wheelhouse before they could radio Miami. The speed was essential because Jason Trench had sent one of his men down with Bunder more than a half hour ago, and he might begin wondering about him at any moment now. If he became concerned, he might possibly call the captain’s cabin and get no answer; his man was alone down there, bound hand and foot, and stuffed into the captain’s berth.

The plan was to unlock the door with the key they had taken from the exec’s cabin, rush the men in the radio room — from the outside, it sounded as if there were two of them, but there might be three, or even four — and silence them. Cates would then warm up the transmitter if it was not already in operation, and send his voice message directly to Radio Miami in Perrine. That was the plan. The only tricky part was overcoming the men inside before they could shout a warning or fire a shot.

“The key,” Luke whispered.

Cates handed it to him. They looked at each other for a moment. Cates nodded. Behind them Bunder wiped his lip. Luke slipped the key into the lock slowly, soundlessly. Inside, the men were laughing. He turned the key. The tumblers made a small clicking sound, but it was drowned by the laughter of the men inside. The door was unlocked.

Luke took hold of the handle.

“Ready?” he whispered.

“Ready,” Cates said.

“Ready,” Bunder said, and wiped his lip again.

Luke pushed on the handle and threw open the door to the radio room just as the ship’s loudspeaker erupted with sound. Bunder and Cates were rushing past him into the room, but Luke stopped short because the loudspeaker was calling him by name. The loudspeaker was shouting in its scratchy mechanical voice, “Luke Costigan, we know you are aboard, we have the girl on the bridge. We will kill her if you do not surrender,” the loudspeaker was bellowing like the echoing voice of God, “We will kill the girl, we will kill the girl, we will kill the girl!”

The men in the radio room whirled at the sudden sound of the loudspeaker. There were three men in all, and two of them had left their rifles in the far corner of the room. The third man sat near the transmitter with his rifle across his lap, and he brought it into firing position the moment he saw Bunder and Cates rushing into the room. The captain of the ship was carrying out the plan just the way they had outlined it below — he was rushing these men and trying to put them out of commission without firing a shot. Bunder, following his captain, was attempting to do the same thing. The loudspeaker was shouting a warning. The two unarmed men were moving toward their rifles in the corner. The man sitting in front of the transmitter slipped his finger inside the trigger guard of his rifle, curled it around the trigger, and began shooting. The first volley caught Bunder in the chest, and he shouted “No!” and that was all, and then began staggering forward. The second volley came from the far corner of the room where both of the other men had picked up their rifles. Luke saw Cates drop his .45 and stumble back against Bunder who was bleeding profusely, and then both men dropped to the deck and Luke turned away and ran for the ladder leading up to the bridge.

It occurred to him as he took the steps up — he took them two at a time despite his bad leg — it occurred to him that the men in the radio shack were now behind him with the same guns that had felled Bunder and Cates, and that Jason Trench was above him and ahead of him on the bridge with more men and more guns. It occurred to him that the entire world had disintegrated into groups of men holding guns, some behind you and some ahead of you, and that the only thing you could do was remain unafraid in the face of whatever was happening, cling to the hope that mankind had not completely lost its reason, resist long enough and loud enough until they all put down their weapons.

A shot rang out behind him.

He was on the bridge now and running for the wheelhouse. There was another shot behind him, and he thought at first he’d been hit but he realized he’d only slipped momentarily on the wet bridge deck, and suddenly he felt invincible. Nothing could possibly harm him now, he thought. He knew that what he was doing was right, he knew that his own unselfish motives, his own brave and courageous attempt to stop these maniacs before they destroyed themselves and the world would somehow succeed. He would storm that goddamn wheelhouse and pull Samantha out of their clutches and save the world, because what he was doing was good and right, and what they were doing was evil.

He threw open the wheelhouse hatch.

Jason was still at the microphone. The loudspeaker was still bleating; he hadn’t even heard it after those first arresting ominous words. He heard it again now, “We have the girl, we will kill her, we will kill—” and then the words stopped as Jason turned from the microphone and Luke said, like the hero he felt he was, like the man who was about to save the world, “This is it, Trench.”

Jason fired four times.

Each of his bullets caught Luke in a different part of his body. Samantha, who was being held by Rodiz across the wheelhouse, screamed when the first bullet struck Luke and tore away half his face, and then screamed again as the second bullet exploded into his throat. Luke’s finger tightened around the trigger of his own gun in that moment, more as a reflex spasm than as any consciously directed action — all thought, all feeling, had been blown from his head with Jason’s first shot. His finger jerked fitfully against the trigger as he began falling toward the deck, the single bullet exploding from the muzzle of his gun and slamming into the metal deck and then ricocheting wildly across the wheelhouse, screaming from bulkhead to bulkhead like a wild buzzing hornet, finally smashing into the sloped top of the radar gear and shattering the scope. He was dead before he struck the deck, but Jason fired two more bullets into his back and shoulders.

Samantha broke away from Rodiz and ran screaming to where Luke lay in his own blood. She was lifting his head into her lap when Annabelle fired at her with the.22, killing her instantly.

The world was poised for anarchy.

18

One of the men in the bunker was a corporal in the Cuban Army, and the other was a Russian civilian who had been in Cuba for eight months and who wanted to go home. He was writing a letter to his wife when the corporal called to him from the other room. Reluctantly he put down the clipboard to which his single sheet of stationery was attached, rose, and went to where the corporal sat in semidarkness before the Russian-built radar.

The corporal did not know any Russian, and the Russian knew only a little Spanish, so they would have had difficulty communicating even if they liked each other, which they did not. Moreover, it was almost two-thirty in the morning, and both men were tired, and both were annoyed by the radar which had been flashing electronic echoes from high ocean waves all night long, and which seemed to be performing erratically and irrationally because of the hurricane. The Cuban corporal secretly felt that the Russians did not know how to build radar anyway, even if they were capable of shooting people off into space, and the Russian civilian secretly felt that these indolent Spaniards were incapable of operating anything more complicated than a straight razor. So the feeling in the bunker was hardly one of understanding, even before the Cuban picked up what now appeared to be a target some forty-five miles northwest of Havana.

The corporal pointed to the illuminated dot of light on the scope as the sweep line went past. The Russian nodded and watched it fade. The electronic line made its 360-degree sweep, and the orange dot appeared once again. The men continued to watch the scope in silence. The target appeared each time the sweep line went past, a bright clear echo that seemed to indicate there was a vessel out there on the water, a vessel moving steadily and inexorably toward the Cuban coastline.

The corporal did not know exactly what his role was in relation to all these Russians who were instructing them and buying their cigars and laying their women, and besides he was a cautious man by nature. His job was to watch the radar, and that was all. He did not want to make any decisions about the target which was now about forty-two miles offshore, if this Russian radar could be trusted, and if this wasn’t simply another wave echo, although none of the other wave echoes had kept moving steadily toward Havana. The Russian, on the other hand, was nothing more than a civilian adviser who was standing this foolish middle-of-the-night watch with the corporal only to make certain he had mastered control of the machinery, a feat he was sure the Cubans would never accomplish. He wasn’t quite sure to whom they should report this target, if indeed it was a target at all.

Silently, they kept watching the scope, each secretly hating the other, and each secretly hoping this was nothing more serious than a wave echo.

The second target appeared on the screen suddenly.

If there had been a lack of understanding in the room before that moment, there was total understanding now. If there had been a lack of sympathy before, there was now agreement bordering on wild hysteria. The corporal and the civilian looked at the screen and then turned to face each other. For the first time that night, they were ready to admit that somewhere out on that water — somewhere about forty-one miles away, to be exact — there was not only one vessel heading for Havana, but possibly two — in fact definitely two, because the second target was now sending back an echo as bright and as strong as the first.

They watched the scope in fascinated terror, expecting to see yet another electronic dot appear, and another, and still another, until a huge invasion armada filled the scope. They stared motionless as the two dots approached each other in what seemed to be a calculated maneuver, watched and waited breathlessly, wondering what their next move should be — should they sound an alarm, should they call the patrol boat command, should they alert the airfield?

All at once, a third dot appeared, a huge electronic burst that startled them both, overwhelming the two dots that had been on the screen earlier. They knew immediately that an enormous vessel had joined the formation, either a battleship or an aircraft carrier, hiding the other two from view. The sweep line came around again, a bright thin orange line coming nearer and nearer to where the invasion armada was massing. They watched silently, their terror rising, waiting for confirmation of what they had witnessed only seconds before. The sweep line moved toward the exact spot, closer and closer.

Nothing appeared on the screen.

The Russian and the Cuban turned to stare at each other and then blinked and then turned their attention back to the radar again. The sweep line was advancing toward the same spot once more, a position forty miles northwest of them, moving swiftly, and then passing the point again — and again there was nothing on the screen. There had been an enormous burst of electronic light not more than a minute ago, surely marking the appearance of a third huge vessel, and now there was no sign of anything. The third vessel, if such it had been, seemed to have disappeared, and with it the two other vessels as well. Puzzled, they continued to watch the empty screen.

None of the targets appeared again.

Radio Miami knew the cutter Mercury had been answering a distress call some fifty miles off the coast of Cuba, because she had radioed them at midnight to report her position and her destination. About a half hour after that, they monitored a conversation between the Merc and a Navy destroyer on patrol duty. The destroyer had raised the Merc to ask whether there was anything wrong with her running lights. The Merc replied that there had been an electrical failure.

“Are you in need of emergency equipment?” the destroyer asked.

“Negative, negative,” the Merc said. “We have just about located the difficulty.”

“Ah, roger,” the destroyer said. “We will stand by until you are functioning properly again.”

The Merc apparently located the difficulty and repaired the malfunction, because Radio Miami later monitored a conversation between the destroyer and another ship in its squadron, stating that the Mercury was on its way again with its lights functioning, and the destroyer was resuming patrol. It was possible, of course, that there was a later electrical failure, which once again put out the cutter’s running lights. Considering the storm conditions off the coast of Cuba, however, it was difficult to fathom why the cutter would not have made use of battery-powered lights if there had been such a failure. In the beginning, no one even imagined that the cutter was deliberately running without lights. In the beginning, everyone was too involved with trying to figure out exactly what had happened.

It was supposed at first that the other vessel involved was the very vessel that had sent the SOS to which the Merc was responding. There was some confusion there, too, however, because if this had been the ship in distress, she would have been expecting the Merc and certainly looking for her, even if she was traveling without fights. Moreover, since the vessel came out of the storm just about where the Merc knew she would be, at latitude 23.37 north, longitude 81.54 west, the Merc should have been actively searching for her with radar. The possibility of a second electrical failure that had knocked out the Merc’s single radar scope as well was, of course, discarded once all the facts were in. Nor was there speculation on any other possible malfunction of the radar, a broken cable, a shattered scope face. The only logical assumption was that the storm had raised waves high enough to prevent anything but intermittent radar reception. The second vessel, it was assumed, had simply materialized out of the night, undetected by radar, if indeed anyone aboard the Merc was even monitoring the scope. The cutter, traveling without lights, had not been seen either. The collision was almost inevitable.

The accident was reported to Radio Miami by a second patrolling Navy destroyer. Miami received the message at 0238 from the U.S.S. Bunt. The Bunt reported an enormous explosion south-southwest of her position, and advised that she was proceeding at best possible speed to investigate. At 0316, the Bunt reported that she was at the scene and gave the latitude and longitude for the first time. She advised that there was no sign of any vessel, but that debris floating on the water indicated there had been a collision between two ships or a ship and a boat, it was difficult to tell. At 0324, the Bunt called in again to state that she had recovered debris marked with the name of the Mercury.

At four-thirty in the morning, the first public news broadcast went out over a Miami radio station. It said simply that a 165-foot Coast Guard cutter had accidentally collided with what was assumed to be a small fishing boat, and that both vessels were reported sunk some forty miles northwest of Havana. There were, the announcer said, no survivors.

Harry and the others in Ocho Puertos must have known at once that Jason Trench’s plan had failed.

At ten minutes past five, a little more than an hour before dawn of the morning of October seventh, the Florida State Highway Patrol received a call from a man who identified himself as Amos Carter. He told them that the people of the town of Ocho Puertos had been held as prisoners from early yesterday morning until just a few minutes ago, and that a man named Marvin Tannenbaum had been shot and killed. Within the next ten minutes the police received telephone calls from four other people in the town, all of whom reported having been kept there as prisoners. One of the callers said her name was Lucy Nelson and that someone (they could not understand the name she gave because she was crying into the phone) had been killed early yesterday morning and was out on the porch covered with a blanket.

The police arrived a half hour before dawn.

The people of the town were standing in the road.

They were all very excited, all talking at the same time, to themselves and to the troopers. It was all over now, and now they could afford to rehash it with the same sort of excitement that followed any adventure. It was all over now, and those who had survived could relate the tale with a curious sort of tragic glee. Amos Carter took them to the storage locker, and the troopers shot the lock off the door and released the men there. One of the men said his name was Michael Pierce and that he was executive officer of the Coast Guard cutter Mercury, and then he went on to relate what had happened aboard the ship yesterday. The cops, who had not yet heard any news of the disaster off Cuba, listened very calmly. One of them looked somewhat confused. Pierce excused himself and said he wanted to call the Coast Guard in Miami. The trooper said, Sure, go right ahead. Amos Carter was telling them about a scheme to involve the United States in war. A woman named Rachel Tannenbaum was asking them to call an ambulance for her husband, who had suffered a heart attack. The man, who was lying on a blanket in the back of the marina office, kept telling them as they made their call that his son had been a hero. “My son was a hero,” he said. “My son was a hero.” A tall good-looking gentleman with graying hair said he had only wandered into all this by accident and asked whether or not they would need him any longer. The others verified his story, and the police said they guessed he could go. One of them asked his name and address. He gave his name as David Cummings and his address as Scranton, Pennsylvania.

About fifteen minutes after they had arrived, the troopers found the drunken man and woman in the back of the bait and tackle shop.

“My name is Willy,” the man said. “This here is my girl Ginny.”

“I never saw him before in my life,” the woman said.

“We got some questions to ask you, Willy,” one of the troopers said.

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Like where all your friends ran off to.”

“I don’t have to tell you nothing,” Willy said.

The trooper smiled. “Sure,” he said. “But we think you will.”

About ten minutes past dawn on Monday morning, October seventh, the U.S.S. Bunt radioed Miami to say it had recovered some additional material from the water.

“Only thing we can figure,” the Bunt reported, “is that the boat was heading for Haiti.”

“Which boat?”

“The one the Merc hit.”

“Oh, really? How do you get that?”

“Well, this crate we fished out of the water was loaded with pamphlets.”

“What kind of pamphlets?”

“Communist stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

“Communist propaganda. It’s in French — that’s what they speak in Haiti, you know — but one of our men translated it for us. It’s all about Duvalier, the dictator down there, and how the people should rise up against him the way the Cubans rose up against Batista, and how they would be helped with arms and explosives and food and whatever else they needed. You should read this stuff. It’s wild, believe me.”

“Just the Merc’s luck, huh?”

“What do you mean?”

“To run into a bunch of Communist fanatics,” Radio Miami said.