A Flag for Sunrise (46 page)

Freddy Negus, holding to the wheel, had pulled the night shade down behind the cockpit. Callahan, a drink in one hand, stood beside the wheelhouse hatch running his infrared binoculars along the coastline.

“How’s traffic?” Negus asked him. “I’m getting blips on my scope here.”

“Let’s light it up,” Callahan said.

Negus threw a switch that lit the running lights in the stabilizer mast and the work areas around the hatches. Callahan went forward to light a spot on the forepeak.

“We’re gonna be out in front of Port Alvarado presently, boss,” Negus said.

Callahan refilled his glass and bent to inspect the digits on the Raytheon and leaned over his chart table. He turned the Loran signal up so that it was audible and timed the tones on his watch.

“We’re getting there, Freddy. What’s your bottom like?”

“Bottom is marbles,” Negus said. “A couple of yards to starboard and we’d be sitting on them.”

Callahan hung in the hatchway, looking coastward.

“I got Puerto Alvarado light,” he told Negus. “I see the bastard. If you could get me a mite more speed, Freddy, I would love it. So we have a tiny bit of daylight when we drop the buoy.”

“I can get you twelve knots on just the main engine. That’s what you got.”

“Puerto Alvarado,” Callahan said, pronouncing the city’s name in careful Spanish. “I see the banana piers and I believe I see the national streetlight.”

“Some hole that place is,” Negus said. “Had to get some of my boys out of jail there once. No trouble either. Being a British subject meant something in those days.”

Callahan studied the harbor.

“They planted a few light buoys in these roads since I was here last,” he said. He glanced at the Raytheon scope. “Lot of boats around without lights.”

“That’s how it is out here,” Negus said. “Nothing faster than ten knots. Nothing coming our way.”

Callahan checked the Loran digits and his charts.

“Very shortly we’ll get on the CB. Right around the point.”

Callahan had taken the rum bottle from the galley shelf and was pouring himself another drink, easing the neck of the bottle against the glass so that Negus would not hear him, when Negus stood up in his chair and turned around.

“Look at this, Jack. I got a fucker on here bearing three-forty. He’s coming at us and he’s coming fast.”

Callahan put his drink in the galley rack, ran into the lounge to slam his wife’s door twice and ran out on deck with the glasses.

“I don’t see him,” Callahan said. “He’s not lit.”

“Bugger fucking all,” Negus said.

Deedee Callahan was standing beside her husband in the next moment, straining to see into the near darkness.

“Engage the diesels, lover,” he told her. “Do it faster than anything.”

She ran around to the engine space and had opened the metal hatch when she heard her husband laugh.

“He just lit up,” Callahan called to them. “He’s a dragger.”

Negus looked out the windshield at the fresh lights.

“He must have been making thirty. You sure he’s a dragger?”

“He’s the Rastafarian Navy,” Callahan said, watching through the glasses. “He’s going right into Alvarado.”

Deedee came forward wiping sweat from her forehead.

“Is there an explanation for him?” she asked. “Or is he just stoned like us?”

“Probably be his lights don’t work very well,” Negus said. “He wants to get in before United Fruit runs him over. And he’s souped up for running ganja.”

“Don’t want no more,” Deedee Callahan sang, “midnight rambles no more.
Que vida.
”

“Where’s that fucking Pablo?” Negus asked.

“Sacked out. Leave him.” He bent over the Raytheon and marked his Loran chart. “O.K.,” he told them, “Freddy’s going to find me a hole in the wall.”

As they looked on, Negus turned the
Cloud
’s head toward the reef and cut speed. Everyone watched the Fathometer.

“Gotta be it,” Negus said after a minute. “Ninety and ninety and sloping up.”

“Engine stop,” Callahan said. “And drop the hook so we don’t drift on the marbles.”

Deedee was on deck peering into the darkness.

“You don’t get more than a flash glow from Alvarado light,” she said. “It’s around that point.”

Callahan was at his chart table with a piece of chart paper before him.

“Let me get a quick line of sight here,” he said.

“There’s an aviation beacon on that mountain,” she said, shielding her eyes from the glow of the deck lights. “It’s on your Loran chart.”

“I got it,” he said. He marked the coordinates from the Raytheon on his line-of-sight chart and x’d in the aviation beacon. They were waiting for the boat to swing full around on its chain.

“Two dock lights at sixty degrees off the beacon. Over them there’s a building with a cross on it.”

“That’s fine if those dock lights are on all night,” Negus said. “But whoever they are must be using a generator because there’s no electricity out here.”

“They’ll be on,” Callahan said. “We were told they’d be on.”

He marked the dock lights on his handmade chart and put it under the Bowditch.

“Now,” he said, “Deedee, go turn that bozo to and get the marker buoy over. It’s time to talk to the customer.”

The CB was silent as Negus dialed in.

“José,” Negus said into the night, “you get those pumps for me?”

“Absolutely, Mr. Fry.” It was a different voice, but relaxed, easy with English.

“That’s just fine,” Negus said, and hung up the receiver. “Think he sees us?” he asked Callahan.

“No question about it,” Callahan said.

Deedee and Pablo came in slightly breathless. At Deedee Callahan’s call, Pablo had been huddled in the lazaret hatch close to Naftali’s pistol, looking at the Puerto Alvarado lights with longing and dread.

“Hi, kids,” Callahan said to his wife and to Pablo. “Now we’re going to open up the arms locker.”

Pablo watched Callahan unlock the gear locker in which his automatic was stowed. There were half a dozen other pistols beside it. Seeing his weapon, Pablo took a step toward it.

“Leave it where it is,” Negus snapped at him.

“No, Pablo,” Callahan said patiently. “We’re unlocking them, we’re not going to wave them at passing shipping.” He stepped through the galley and down into the paneled compartment and there, with another key from his key ring, opened what looked like a teak book chest between two lounge chairs. The chest had a small automatic rifle of foreign make and a number of shotguns. When he had unlocked the chest, he closed it again.

“It’s very frustrating,” Mr. Callahan explained, “to look for keys when you’re in a hurry. In the meantime, let’s everyone remember that we’re a few miles offshore with all our lights blazing like Christmas. So let’s preserve our workaday respectability and demeanor and leave this stuff where it is. Until we need it. Which of course we all hope we will not.”

“You’re so right,” Deedee said.

Callahan picked up the glass of rum he had been drinking. “Now,” Callahan said to Pablo, “you and Deedee are going shrimping.”

“I don’t follow you there,” Pablo said.

“Mrs. Callahan will explain.” He put his hand beside his wife’s ear; it was a caress of sorts. “And while you’re out on deck, Dee, put a watch cap over your hair, O.K.? So you’ll look like a gringo shrimper and not a Rhine maiden?”

She went into her quarters and came out with a black watch cap and a green down vest. She tucked her hair under the cap and winked at Pablo.

“Let’s go, Tex,” she said to Pablo. “Let’s go get the hatches clear.”

When they were on deck, Callahan sat down in the cockpit chair and drained his drink. He picked up the rough line-of-sight chart he had make and smiled at Negus.

“We’ll take her out on the Bonaire radio beacon. Right out on one-eighty. At eleven hundred we’ll have her back here along zero-zero-zero.”

“Aye, aye,” Negus said, and swung the bow toward the open sea.

“We’ll have the net over,” Callahan went on, looking at the Raytheon scope, “so you better keep the speed way down. Eight or nine knots, no more.”

“Hey, Jack, lay off the sauce, will you? We got a lot of time to kill and you’re like to get me started.”

Callahan made a placatory gesture with his slim small hand. They heard the stabilizer engine cough up and chain line being dragged across the deck.

“Damn Tino,” Negus said.

Deedee Callahan appeared in the galley in work gloves and white shrimper’s boots, the watch cap tucked down to her eyebrows. She took the rum bottle and a handful of joints down from the shelf.

“Hey, man,” she said, eyeing the level of the bottle, “I thought it was you staying sober tonight. I thought it was me could get snackered.”

“You may get as snackered as you see the need of,” Callahan told her.

Negus looked over his shouder.

“What are you gonna do, missus, have a party back there?”

“Why not?” she said. “We gotta head all those little nasty things. You know,” she told them, “I was once quite fond of shrimp.”

“Don’t bother heading them,” her husband said. “Just get it in there and make sure it’s all shrimp.”

Negus reached out from his chair and took the bottle from her.

“That’s my limit,” he announced when he had drunk. “First we work, then we can get fucked up. That’s the way you’re supposed to do it.”

“Are we using the tri-net?” Deedee asked.

“The hell with it.” Callahan stood up and went to the hatchway and looked out at the black ocean. With the net and stabilizer down, the
Cloud
had begun to roll at an angle not at all commensurate with the mild weather.

“What’s the Pablo situation?”

“He’s quiet,” she said. “He wants to know what he’s gonna do when we get back to the marker.”

“Well,” Callahan said thoughtfully, “tell him a little about it and make him feel important. But don’t let him get drunk and lose his splendid air of authority. Keep him otherwise occupied.”

“I’ll massage his cock while he heads shrimp, how’s that?”

They passed the bottle around again.

“Hey,” Deedee asked, “you sure you want me to tell him about the operation?”

Callahan looked aft to the stern, where Pablo was straightening out the folds in the dragnet.

“Hell, why not? I want him to feel he has a future with us.”

Negus laughed hoarsely.

“But watch him, Deedee. Watch him good. If he starts acting agitated like there’s too much on his mind, we want to know about it.”

“He always acts that way,” Deedee said. “So how will I know?”

“Intuit,” Callahan told her. “Intuit darkly, and get back with him. He shouldn’t be alone at all from this point.”

When she went out, Negus set the wheel to one-eight-zero and they settled back in their cockpit chairs. Negus lit his pipe.

“Jack, damnit,” he said after several minutes, “this here op … I wouldn’t give … well, I wouldn’t give you a Panamanian peso …”

“Do you have to?” Callahan asked, interrupting him. “Must you fucking say it again?”

Negus fell silent again. But only for a short time.

“That’s a damn fine woman, Jack. I hope you’re taking good care of her.”

“She takes care of me,” Callahan said. “She takes care of us all.”

In a clearing, three stelae stood in file, an even distance apart. Their bases were sunk in morning glory vines but some of the vines had been cut back to reveal the inscriptions and hieroglyphs.

The clearing had been part of a village plantation at different times; wax beans and wildly mutant gourds grew around the slight rise where the three standing stones were. It was bordered on three sides by tall ramon trees. A small stream, originating in the mountains, ran beside it toward the sea.

The place was an obsure joint property of the fruit company and the President’s family, adjoining the land donated to the mission. On certain maps it was marked as an archaeological site but—with the exception of the three stelae—it had been haphazardly denuded of its antiquities long before. A few adventurers hunted there still, at moderate risk. It was a forgotten place.

On the fourth side of the glade was what appeared to be a hill but was in fact a pyramid covered in jungle. It had been excavated forty years earlier, the apartment floors strained and sifted, the chacs removed and crated and sent to Philadelphia.

In the days before the arrival of antiquarians and smugglers, the people of the coast had buried their dead in the patch of salty, infertile soil that was closest to the plinths themselves. Some nameless ones were still interred there—the unknown and the Disappeared. Egan himself had come upon the corpse of an Indian child, somehow strayed from the Montana, and buried it beside the stream. A passer-by, following the path that led from the ocean to the falls at the head of the valley, might miss the stones and the buried pyramid entirely, in the filtered light and the many shapes and shades of green.

Now, Egan came up the path as the sunlight faded like mist from the forest, carrying a plastic briefcase and taking softly to himself. People were waiting for him at the stones. They were foreigners from the North, from South America and Europe. There were more than a
dozen of them; their tents and hammocks were spread throughout the clearing. Young people of their sort, rarely seen before on that coast, had been turning up in increasing numbers, as though there were something for them there. Father Egan would come out and speak to them.

The easternmost stela, discolored from years of rubbings and centuries of weather, faintly showed the outline of a human figure, a man in a feathered headdress. The makings of a fire had been laid before it. As Egan took his place beside the stone marker, a slim young woman with a bandaged arm poured kerosene on the pile of sticks. The foreigners watched, reclining against their packs and ground cloths. Sitting apart from the rest was a hulking blond man with thick-browed elfin features and bright blue eyes.

When the fire was lit, Egan turned away from the group and leaned against the stone, eyes closed. It seemed to him he had a text. There was a cane fire in his brain. Wet-eyed, he rounded on them.

“Why seek ye,” he demanded, “the living among the dead?”