Dr. Death (13 page)

I grinned in reply and started up the stairs to the deck.

"Hai!"
I heard. Then thumping noises, grunting, and again,
"Hai!"

Aft, under the mainsail, Li Chin and Sweets were working out, in a sort of improvised sea-going
dojo.
Sweets was stripped to the waist, his ebony skin gleaming with sweat in the glaring Caribbean sunlight. Li Chin was wearing a costume her master might not have approved of: a bikini so skimpy it seemed to be made of string. But what was interesting was to see Li Chin's mastery of Kung Fu pitted against what was obviously Sweets' equal mastery of karate. Karate is angular, abrupt, with a use of concentrated bursts of force. Kung Fu is linear, designed to make it impossible for an opponent to know where you're coming from. I watched admiringly as Li Chin and Sweets battled, maneuvered, and out-balanced each other to a standstill. Of the two, I gave Li Chin a slight edge. But only a slight one. Sweets Hunter, I decided, was going to be a valuable member of the team, on land as well as sea.

"Hi, Carter," said Li Chin, after she and Sweets had bowed ceremoniously to each other. "Come up for air?"

"For air and a conference," I said. "And that includes you. Sweets."

"Sure thing, man," said Sweets, wiping his chest with a large towel. "Just let me check the auto pilot."

A few minutes later we were all gathered on the hatch cover, bending over a map of Martinique Li Chin had found in the well-equipped charts chest. I pointed to the coastal town of St. Pierre.

"It's just a sleepy little fishing village now," I told the three of them. "Underpopulated. Nothing happening. But behind it, a few miles away, is our volcano, Mont Pelee."

"A little too close for comfort, if it were active," remarked Sweets; unwrapping a chocolate caramel.

I nodded.

Around the turn of the century, it
was
active. At that time, St. Pierre wasn't just a sleepy little village. It was the biggest city on the island. And one of the busiest, most sophisticated cities in the Caribbean. In fact, they called it the Paris of the West Indies. Then Mont Pelee exploded. St. Pierre was totally destroyed. Over forty thousand people — the entire population of the city, except for one convict being held in an underground jail cell — were wiped out. Even today you can see the ruins of buildings inundated by lava.

"But now it is extinct, no?" said Michelle.

"Probably extinct, possibly only dormant," I answered. "Sleeping. Capable of exploding again, given the right circumstances. With volcanoes, you never know. The point is, if you were going to produce and store highly explosive devices, the crater of Mont Pelee, which is huge, would be a good place to do so. Because anyone thinking of attacking you would hesitate, for fear of setting off the volcano."

"And if those explosive devices were to be loaded onto boats, a sleepy little fishing village like St. Pierre would be a nice, unobtrusive place to do it," remarked Li Chin.

"Right," I agreed. "So what we're going to be looking for is signs of unusual activity both in and around the volcano, and in St. Pierre. After we've found a place to drop anchor where we won't be seen, we'll split up into teams of two. Michelle and I will pose as tourists and check out Mont Pelee. Li Chin, you and Sweets can pose as natives. You do speak French?"

"Not so well," said Li Chin. "I'm pretty fluent in French, but my accent is Southeast Asia. Better stick to Spanish, and say I'm an emigre from Cuba. Plenty of Chinese there."

"Plenty of blacks, too," observed Sweets, unwrapping another caramel. "We could have come to Martinique as plantation workers. I've got a groovy little machete around somewhere."

"Good," I said. "Then you two check out St. Pierre."

"What do we do if we find something?" asked Michelle.

"There's a restaurant in the capital. Fort de France, called La Reine de la Caribe. We'll meet there and join forces for action at the end of the day."

Sweets looked a little anxious.

"What kind of a restaurant, man?" he asked. "I'm a little particular about my food."

"Martinique has the best food in the Caribbean," said Michelle. "What else would you expect from an island that is French?"

"Good desserts?" demanded Sweets.

"The best," replied Michelle, with a definite touch of chauvinism.

"I don't know about that," said Li Chin, standing up and flexing her body into some impossible positions. "From what I hear about French food, you're hungry again a half hour after you finish eating."

Michelle shot her a sharp glance, started to say something, then, apparently realizing the irony of Li Chin's remark, clamped her lips tight and looked away.

"Look," I said sharply, "the two of you are going to be working together in this team, so you'll be cooperative and non-hostile to each other whether you like it or not. I'm not going to say that again. Now let's eat, and then get some sleep. I'll take the first watch."

"And I," said Michelle, carefully not looking at Li Chin, "will cook. For the benefit of
all
of us."

Michelle's food was good. Better than good. Even Li Chin agreed to that. But I don't think any of us slept better than fitfully when we were off watch. When dawn broke, all four of us stood at the rail, staring at the craggy, mountainous, yet lushly green profile of the island of Martinique outlined against the eastern sky. Near the northern tip of the island, Mont Pelee rose steep and ominous, toward the wide, blunt snout of its crater.

"Nasty lookin' ant hill, ain't it," Sweets remarked, after turning the wheel over to Li Chin.

"Not half as nasty as what may be inside it," I responded. "Do you have any firepower you can carry?"

Sweets grinned. He pulled a foil-wrapped chocolate-covered cherry out of his shirt pocket, unwrapped it, and plopped it whole into his mouth.

"Care to eyeball the armory?" he asked.

Half an hour later we emerged on deck just as Li Chin dropped anchor in an isolated cove, hidden by a spit of land from the sea, and surrounded by thick jungle vegetation which would hide the
Lady Day
from land roads. From an impressive weapons case, Sweets had selected a.50 mm Walther, a razor-sharp gravity-blade knife which he kept under his belt in the small of his back, and fifteen high-impact mini-grenades, disguised as beads, which he wore in a chain around his neck. With his tattered pants, flapping shirt, and battered straw hat, plus the worn but sharp machete he carried by a leather thong, no one would take him for anything but a sugar-plantation worker. With the casual but expensive looking sport shirts and slacks he furnished Michelle and myself, we would be taken for well-off tourists. Li Chin, in dungarees, worn tee-shirt, straw hat, carrying a lunch basket, and looking suitably humble, would appear to be a dutiful wife taking her working husband his lunch.

Sweets had come up with something else, too: a Honda two-stroke mini-bike, just barely big enough for two. In silence, each of us thinking his or her own thoughts, we manhandled it over the side and into the dinghy. Still in silence, hearing the raucous screeching of jungle birds around us, and feeling the morning sun begin to heat toward the blistering impact it would have at mid-day, we rowed toward the shore. The jungle vegetation rose in front of us like an impassable wall, but after we had tied the dinghy securely to a plantation tree and hoisted the Honda ashore, Sweets unsheathed his machete and set to work. We came in back of him, slowly, as he cleared a path for us. Almost half an hour later we stood on the edge of a clearing. Across a field, a few thousand yards away, a smoothly paved road snaked toward St. Pierre to the south, and, to the northeast stood Mont Pelee.

"Look," said Michelle. "Do you see those gulleys, hundreds of feet wide, running from the crater of the volcano south where nothing grows? Those were the paths of the lava, running toward St. Pierre."

It was an awesome sight. And the sight it conjured up in imagination was even more awesome — thousands of tons of stone blown skyward, the fiery molten rivers of lava eating away everything in their paths, the sudden downpour of volcanic ash petrifying man and beast into fossils as they stood. But I had no time to play the tourist for real.

"Save the sightseeing for later," I said. "This is where we split up. Michelle and I will take the Honda to check out the crater to the volcano, and its approaches. Sweets, you and Li Chin will have to hoof it to St. Pierre. But this is a small island, and you don't have more than a couple of miles to go."

"Right on," said Sweets easily. "I could use the exercise anyway."

"I can always carry him if he gets tired," said Li Chin.

Sweets chuckled, adjusting his Walther and the gravity-blade knife.

I motioned to Michelle, grabbed the Honda by its handlebars, and started pushing it across the field.

"Rendezvous tonight at seven, the Reine de la Caribe, just off the main square in Fort de France," I called back over my shoulder.

Sweets and Li Chin nodded, waved, and set off in the opposite direction. A few minutes later Michelle was seated in back of me on the Honda and we were chugging slowly on the approach to the crater of Mont Pelee.

Seven hours later we had learned two facts. It had been seven hours of chugging along dusty dirt roads, in the full blast of the sun, sweat soaking our bodies, dust choking our mouths, the sun blinding our eyes. Seven hours of arguments with police, deliberate misdirections from field workers, sullen refusals of information from town officials. Seven hours of walking through scrub and across volcanic rock fields, and then lying on our bellies in those same rock fields, trying to see what was going on several hundred yards away.

It had all been worth it.

The crater of the volcano, we had learned, was closed to public access. The two officially marked paths from the base to the crater, recommended for tourists as a pleasant two-hour hike, had been barred by high wooden barriers. Each barrier had a gate manned by a uniformed guard, who politely but firmly denied access, saying the paths to the crater were "closed for maintenance work."

The other two paths to the crater weren't open to the public, either. And they weren't paths. They were well-surfaced roads, obviously put down in the last six months or so. They were on the eastern side of the volcano, and well-hidden from the public roads around the volcano's base, connected to those roads by dirt roads, each of which was barred by heavy wooden gates — again, with uniformed guards.

If you went the long way round, on foot, groping your way through jungle vegetation around the volcano's base, then through scrub and over volcanic rock, you could get a glimpse of what was traveling on those roads to the crater.

Trucks. At least one every fifteen minutes. Heavy canvas-covered trucks with liftgates. Empty. They came from the south, the Atlantic side of the island, and were coming fast. They emerged from the crater going back to the south, heavy-laden, slow, riding low.

In the back of each truck, you could see two guards. They were dressed in full battle dress, and they were carrying automatic weapons.

"Shall I spell it out for you?" I asked Sweets and Li Chin, after telling them the whole story that evening.

"No need to spell it out for this dude," said Sweets. "The letters are OAS, a mile high. And in a paramilitary operation a mile wide. And just as obvious."

"Which is one of the reasons they made Martinique their base of operations," said Li Chin. "They've got some friends in the French administration here who are willing to turn a blind eye to the whole thing."

"And also," put in Michelle, "it is obviously an ideal spot from which to launch an attack on the refinery off Curaçao."

I nodded in agreement, and took another sip of my drink. We were sitting around a table in the Reine de la Caribe, drinking tall, frosty glasses of the local rum punch. It was good, and I hoped that the
langouste
— the Caribbean version of lobster — we had ordered for later would be just as good. And nourishing. I had a feeling we were going to need plenty of energy reserves in the next twenty-four hours. Sweets and Li Chin, who had managed to pick up some more respectable clothes in the market, looked just as fatigued as Michelle and I.

"Well," said Sweets, adding another two spoonfuls of sugar to his punch, "you had a busy day, Carter. But me and my friend here, the Afro-Asian alliance you might call it, managed to dig a little bit of what's going down ourselves."

"Such as?" I demanded.

"Such as, St. Pierre is deader than East Peoria on a Sunday night in February after a blizzard," said Li Chin. "Fish, fish, and more fish. And fishermen. Fishing. That's it."

"Now, we don't have anything against fish," said Sweets. "In fact, we had a real tasty one for lunch, in a sort of sweet and sour sauce. But…"

"He means sweet and sweet," said Li Chin. "First time I've ever had dessert as a main course. And mackerel, yet."

"Anyway," went on Sweets with a smile, "we figured that, like you said, it was a small island, so we hopped one of those jitneys, those public taxis, and took us a little tour across the island to the south coast."

"Where," broke in Li Chin, making the two of them begin to strongly resemble a Mutt and Jeff act, "we found the action. If you want action, try Lorrain and Marigot."

"Fishing villages on the south coast," I said.

"Where there's damned little fishing going on," said Sweets, spooning up sugar from the bottom of his drained glass. "Never in all my life have I seen so many fishing boats, big and little, sitting around not fishing in good fishing weather. And trucks visiting the harbor, to carry some kind of machinery out to them, when it looks to me like a lot of them don't even have engines."

"Yachts?" I asked.

"Yachts, skiffs, sloops, brigantines, yawls — everything from a rowboat to a schooner," said Li Chin.