White Cargo

5

Cat woke gently, as from a deep sleep. It was amazingly cool, he thought, for such a hot climate. There was a lot of whiteness around him. Everything was white.

He felt a rush of panic and tried to sit up but could not. He was too weak. What was happening? He tried to calm himself; he looked around the room, wanting a clue to his whereabouts. A hospital, obviously. There were three other beds in the room, all empty and unmade. A stand beside his bed held a container of clear liquid, which was attached to a needle in his arm. Had he hallucinated? Had all of it been a horrible dream? He placed a hand on his chest and found thick bandages. He pressed slightly, and was greeted with a stab of pain. No dream. It had happened, and to his great sorrow, he was having no trouble remembering all of it.

He found a buzzer hanging near his head and pressed it. A moment later a Latin woman in a nurse’s uniform rushed into the room. “You are awake,” she said, rather stupidly, Cat thought.

He tried to speak, but his throat and tongue were as dry as paper. Nothing would work. The nurse seemed to understand and poured him a glass of water from a bedside thermos, stuck a glass straw in it, and offered it to him. He drank some cool water, then flushed his mouth until the paper feeling went away.

“Where?” he managed to say.

“You are in Cuba,” the woman replied. Her accent was only slight.

“My family,” he said. He had to know if it had been real.

Her face twitched. “I’ll get somebody,” she said, and left the room.

A couple of minutes passed, then the nurse returned with a young man in a white jacket over what looked like naval uniform trousers. “I’m Dr. Caldwell,” he said to Cat, reaching for his pulse. “How are you feeling?”

Cat merely nodded. “My wife and daughter are dead,” Cat said. He stated it as a fact; he didn’t want to give the man an opportunity to lie to him.

The young man nodded. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “You remember, then.”

Cat nodded. “Are you Cuban?”

The doctor looked puzzled for a moment. “Oh, no,” he said, finally. “You’re at Gantánamo Naval Base, not on Cuban soil. A Coast Guard search and rescue chopper brought you in here two days ago.”

“How badly am I hurt?”

“Well, you weren’t in very good shape when you arrived. We spent a couple of hours picking birdshot out of you. What was it, a .410-gauge?”

Cat nodded. “My own.”

“Be glad it wasn’t a twelve-gauge and buckshot. You’re in no danger, as far as I can tell. In fact, I’m surprised it took you so long to come around. It was almost as if you didn’t want to wake up.”

“The boat?”

“There’s an investigating officer here; I’ve sent for him. He’ll fill you in.”

As if on cue, another officer, a lieutenant, entered the room. “Hello, Mr. Catledge,” he said. “Welcome back.”

Cat nodded. “Thanks.”

“You feel up to a chat?”

“Okay.” He pointed at the bed. “Can you crank this thing up?”

The officer raised the bed until Cat was nearly sitting.

“The boat?” Cat asked again. He wanted to ask about bodies.

“My name is Lieutenant Frank Adams, call me Frank. I’m a military police officer. Is your name Wendell Catledge?”

Cat nodded.

Adams looked relieved. “I ran your fingerprints,” he said, “and we got the registration on your boat. You didn’t have any identification.”

Cat lifted his left arm and looked at the wrist. “My name is engraved on the inside of my watch.” There was a white stripe against his yellowing tan.

“You weren’t wearing a watch.”

“I’m sure I had it on when they came,” Cat said. “It was a little before six in the morning. What about the boat and my wife and daughter.”

Adams pulled up a chair and sat down. “A little after eight in the morning, Thursday, that’s two days ago, a Lufthansa flight from Bogotá to San Juan picked up the signal from your EPIRB. Less than an hour later, a Coast Guard helicopter found the boat and put two frogmen in the water. She was well down by the bows. You were in the cockpit. Your... the women were in the main cabin, both dead. Before the two men could even get you into the chopper, the boat stood on her nose and went straight down. You were in the water for a couple of minutes before they got you up. The bodies went down with the boat. There was nothing they could do.”

Cat nodded, and his eyes filled with tears.

“Your brother-in-law is here, staying in our bachelor officer quarters; I’ve sent for him. Do you think you can tell me about it now? I want to do everything I can, but I need the details.” Adams produced a small tape recorder.

Cat got hold of himself and began at the beginning.

When Cat woke up again, Ben Nicholas, Katie’s brother and Cat’s business partner, was sitting next to the bed, his normally open, friendly face showing the shock. Before Cat could speak, Ben took his hand.

“You don’t have to tell me about it,” he said with some difficulty. “Lieutenant Adams played the tape recording for me. He was very impressed with how thorough you were.”

“Thank you, Ben,” Cat said. “How long have you been here?”

“I got in last night. They flew me in a Navy plane from Miami. They’ve made me comfortable. Never thought I’d get to Cuba.”

“Me, either. Does Dell know?”

“The doctor says we can move you to Atlanta in a day or two. I’ve got an air ambulance standing by in Miami. They’ll hop over here when we get the word.”

“Have you told Dell?”

Ben shook his head. “I couldn’t find him, Cat. There was an answering machine on his phone; I didn’t want to tell him that way. I went around to his place, in that high rise; nobody answered the bell. Doorman said he hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. Liz is calling him every hour. She wants you to stay with us until you’re better. She’d have been here herself, but her mother’s in the hospital again. The P.R. guy at the office has been dealing with the press. Some wire-service reporter got onto it, from the Coast Guard, I guess, then a business reporter at The New York Times recognized your name, then the Atlanta papers went with it, and... well, all hell broke loose. There wasn’t any way to avoid having the details made public. It was just too sensational a story — well-known businessman-inventor, all that.”

Cat nodded. “Ben, it’s my fault; I did it to Katie and Jinx.”

“No, no, Cat, you mustn’t think that. You didn’t deliberately put them in danger; you couldn’t have foreseen this.”

“I took them into that place. Katie didn’t want to go, I talked her into it, I pushed her.”

“Listen to me, Cat,” Ben said. “I know how much you loved Katie and Jinx. You just did what you thought was best, and it went wrong. It happens like that sometimes; you can’t see something like that coming. It’s nobody’s fault but the people who did it. Katie would see it that way; Jinx, too. That’s the way you’ve got to see it. You’ll go nuts if you don’t.”

They both began crying. Cat got an arm around Ben, and they sat that way for a moment, sobbing. After they had composed themselves and Ben had gone, Cat knew he would not cry anymore. He couldn’t allow himself that much self-pity again, not if he was to go on living.

His memory began to pluck at him, but he pushed it aside, blanked it out. He couldn’t bear to see that scene on the yacht again. An image forced its way into his head, though, skirting his defenses. The handprint stood out, vivid and red. Then the anger began. And through the anger came a question: Why? Not just why him or why Katie and Jinx, but why at all? His best memory of the yacht after those people had left was that it was absolutely intact. All the expensive electronics were in place, the boat had no appearance of having been ransacked. They had many possessions on board that a thief would have wanted, but none of them had been taken. He had no enemies that he knew of, and anyway, this thing couldn’t have been planned, because the decision to sail into Colombian waters had been made on the spur of the moment. Not until the dawn of that terrible day had he, himself, known that they would be sailing into Santa Marta.

To all appearances, these people had committed a wanton act of piracy and two murders — three, they thought — for no gain except a twenty-five-hundred-dollar Rolex wristwatch. It made no sense whatever, and that made Cat angrier still.

He knew that Katie and Jinx were lost beyond hope, that he could never have them back, but almost as much as he wanted the people who had killed them, he wanted to know why it had been done.

He began building toward a state of new resolve: He would spend every dime he had and the rest of his life, if necessary, to find out.