Conquistador (68 page)

“Aye, we'll cruise a bit off Santa Barbara,” he said to Adrienne, giving Tom a courteous nod. “Those are well-traveled waters, s'truth. We'll be seen by ships and aircraft both; then we'll turn and head”—he waved to the southwest. “Off the wind on that heading lie the Marquesas, and we'll be nicely making way. Cruise there, up to the islands, and it'll be a while before it's realized you're no aboard, miss, but the
Sea-Witch
herself, she'll be seen and spoken of at once—on the radio, too, no fear.”

Tom seated himself. “I'm a bit noticeable myself,” he pointed out.

McKay grinned, a snaggletoothed expression in his bushy beard and mustache, and pointed silently to his son.

The young man was in his twenties, and only a finger under Tom's six-three and a bit, but he was gangly rather than broad-shouldered and deep-chested, and until today his freckled face had been topped by a thatch of stiff gingery curls. Tom's eyebrow went up as he saw that the unruly mop had been cut close in a good imitation of the Ranger crop he wore, and dyed silver-blond as well.

“From a distance . . .” he said.

“Aye,” McKay said with satisfaction. He cocked an eye skyward. “This wind'll no hold. I may need the auxiliary if we're to make the coast again by sunset.”

Tom had the impression that McKay regarded using the diesel engine as a confession of failure of some sort.
Purist,
he thought.

Adrienne's eyes met his; she was wearing a sarong, a halter, and red hibiscus flowers in her hair; she winked slightly, and he knew she'd read his thoughts.

Now,
this
is more like being on an op,
Tom thought. The
No Biscuit
had made its rendezvous with the yacht neatly enough.
One to pilot, one to come aboard the
Sea-Witch
and impersonate Adrienne . . . complicated!

The
Sea-Witch
pitched slightly as it lay with its nose into the wind blowing from the shore; the sunset was fading sternward, a smudge of red along a horizon fading from green to deep night blue. He could see the outline of the San Pedro hills to the southwest and the mountains behind Malibu—the place where Malibu was FirstSide—to the north. There was enough light from the stars, a frosted multitude that faded only around the one-quarter moon—more stars than he was used to seeing FirstSide except in the most remote desert wilderness.

The
No Biscuit
floated half a hundred yards away, and the inflatable boat shuttled between them. Adrienne's cousin Irene came over the rail with a grin that was more than a little like hers, ready to take her place in the masquerade.

“This is like the story about the wolf, the sheep and the cabbage,” the younger woman said. “Good luck, Cuz.”

“Enjoy the islands, Cuz,” Adrienne replied. “Try to act like me.”

“I don't know if I'm up to that, but I'll do my best—it ought to be fun trying!”

Their gear went over the side in a net, hung from a cable on the long boom; crewmen held the rubber boat close to the yacht with boathooks. Tom followed, pulling his night-sight goggles down; the rope was harsh against his palms as they went over the side. A low, muted throb came from the schooner's diesel, enough to cover the muted hum of the outboard; Tom took charge of that, since he'd had a fair bit of boat training, and the vibration surged up his hand and forearm as he opened the throttle wider and twisted the tiller to bring the inflatable around and away, settling on an eastward course toward the black outline of the land. The
Sea-Witch
turned westward as soon as they'd cast free, her bow coming about to the northwest and her sails rising with a rattle of winches and a flapping of sheets that turned taut as they caught the wind. The schooner heeled over and began to pick up speed; the seaplane remained quiet, pitching gently on the waves—it would stay there until the
Sea-Witch
was well away.

“This heading,” Adrienne said, settling in beside him on the rearmost bench and holding out a digital compass with a faintly glowing display.

The flat bottom of the inflatable struck the water, slapping it as they picked up speed. Their destination was a little north of where the Los Angeles River ran into the sea; here and now the stream reached salt water well to the north of the Palos Verdes hills, along the course of what he'd known as Bellona Creek. And “course” was a misnomer, since the river wandered through a broad ill-defined zone of wetlands and swamps all the way to the ocean; on the coast everything between Santa Monica-that-wasn't and Palos Verdes was seaside swamp, saltwater or brackish marsh, miles of it. More stretched between those hills and the site of Long Beach. Even in high summer the scent from the land was damp, smelling of those vast wetlands.

“And on FirstSide it's a dry concrete ditch,” Tom murmured, and heard Adrienne chuckle beside him.

Spray struck his face, cool and tasting of iodine and salt; he wiped his night-vision goggles with his sleeve and peered ahead. An endlessness of reeds rustled to the southward; now that the mudflats were covered by the high tide, but this shallow-draft boat could go almost anywhere. Tully called to him a moment before he saw it himself; a blinking light, so faint that it would have been invisible to unaided vision. White sand gleamed nearby, where higher land rose northward.

Tom's teeth showed in a fighting grin. The pretense was over, and the mission was about to begin.

Tom brought the inflatable in quickly, running the bow up as far as he could on the wet sand. Then he jumped over the side of the rubber boat and held it as the waves thumped it against the ground and small tumbling ripples of foam hissed around his feet. The others followed, and the four of them grabbed the rope loops along its sides and ran it higher, up onto the sloping surface of the beach. He looked around; as best as he could tell, they'd landed right on target—around the southern part of Palisades Beach, near where the Santa Monica Pier was FirstSide, at the westward end of Colorado Avenue. A sandstone cliff stood inland a couple of hundred yards, low here but rising to the north; off that way he could just glimpse a few lights burning in the night, a large sprawling house or small village.

He felt a moment of disorientation; the geography was the same, but he was used to seeing this spot in a blaze of lights—some of the most expensive housing in the United States was within a mile or two, and a few miles north were the condos of Malibu, not to mention the meganecropolis that stretched from here to San Diego and inland to the edges of the Mohave. The smell was entirely different, sea salt and iodine, beach wrack crunching underfoot, the silty mud of the huge marshes to the south.

The feeling of weird dislocation wasn't as bad this time.
I'm getting used to it,
he thought grimly.

“We're right on the place they filmed
Baywatch,
” Tully said reverently, and Sandra giggled. “And thereabouts is the carousel they used in
The Sting. . . .
”

“Roy,” Tom said, with warning in his voice. It was scarcely the time to indulge one's old-movie fixation.

The other man chuckled quietly and subsided, shrugging. They all went down to one knee beside the inflatable, unslinging the rifles they wore across their backs and scanning the darkness through their night-sight goggles. They gave good vision, but it wasn't quite like normal sight—there was a bright, slight flatness to their surroundings that made it harder to judge distances. Adrienne pushed hers up and used a pair of powerful binoculars instead for a moment. He recognized the instrument from the square, molded look and the digital controls on the top; it was a cutting-edge FirstSide military model, with automatic light compensation and a built-in range finder. The GPS system wouldn't work here, of course.

“Right on target,” she said quietly. “That's the Versfelds' home place—Hendricksdorp, their equivalent of Rolfe Manor or Colletta Hall.” She pointed to the lights, shining from around the curve of the bay and a little inland, just beneath the deeper darkness of the mountains.

“Nobody but Versfeld's people will be wandering around here—and Piet can talk his way past them. Better to keep out of their way, of course.”

“Speaking of the devil,” Tom said.

The cliff sloped down to ground level nearby. A horse whickered quietly from that direction, and several men came toward them—two tall men, and a slighter one of average height; he could hear the crunch of their boots in the sand. A little closer, and he could recognize the gorilloid shape of Piet Botha. The younger man beside him resembled him enough to be his son, and almost certainly was. And Henry Villers. The black man was standing a bit aside from the Afrikaners, and there was something in their body language that spoke of strained politeness all around.

My sympathy is underwhelming, Piet,
Tom thought.
I'll
work
with you, but I don't have to
like
you.

Like the four from the sea, the three men waiting for them were dressed in Commonwealth militia uniform—stone-gray bush jacket and trousers of tough cotton drill with plenty of accordion-pleat pockets and leather patches on elbows and knees, and a floppy-brimmed jungle hat; the outfit faded into the background well. They also wore the webbing harness, which seemed to be based on the Israeli design, one he'd always envied: broad belt with adjustable lacing and many carrying attachments, padded straps over the shoulders, and load-bearing pouches in the small of the back. Tom was willing to bet that the designer had suffered through a couple of campaigns in the sort of stuff rear-echelon types thought up for field men to wear.

“Miss Rolfe,” Botha said; she nodded acknowledgment.

Adrienne and Sandra kept watch with rifles ready; the men slung their weapons, bent in unison and lifted the boat, with Botha and Tom opposite each other at the rear, where the boxes were stacked. It wasn't all that heavy itself, but the crates of weapons and gear weighed more than twice what any of them did, even Tom or the still more massively built Piet. The soft sand made for bad footing, and it churned under their feet as they panted upslope; he leaned away from the weight, teeth fixed in a grimace of effort and sweat stinging his eyes. The going went easier as they came to rock and dirt held by coarse dry grass; they were all sweating, but the night was pleasant, no more than sixty degrees and with a fresh breeze off the water that made it seem cooler.

“Here,” Botha said, indicating a deep pit about the size of a grave; a pick and shovel leaned against a boulder near it.

Thank you, O taciturn man of the veld,
Tom thought sardonically.

They lifted the cargo free and stacked it, then deflated the boat with a hiss and smell of synthetic-tinged air. He and Tully rolled it into a compact bundle, stuffed it into the predug hole, slid the silenced outboard engine into a tough canvas sack and dropped that in as well. A few minutes' work buried the whole under sand and tumbled rock; he stopped and carefully memorized the lay of the land, turning in a complete circle and taking a bearing on conspicuous landmarks as best he could in the dark. He noticed that the others did likewise, in their different ways—it was appallingly easy to lose something completely, in trackless country, even if you knew the general location.

I'm glad everyone seems to know their business,
Tom thought, as they carried the boxes up a narrow pathway to the crest of the higher ground inland; he slung two on his shoulders and trotted easily under the hundred and eighty pounds of weight.

This wasn't like an op in the Rangers, where he was working with people he'd spent years beside and whose strengths and weaknesses he knew inside out. He and Roy had been together long enough in the SOU to develop an instinctive rapport too. Depending on so many relative strangers made him a little nervous, but there was nothing he could do about it except hope they'd shake down quickly.