Mambo (53 page)

Here and there, between squalls when the wind withdrew, the beaten landscape could be seen – beaches, a shoreline, sand dunes, visible only for seconds then swallowed again. Pagan shut his eyes. The roar of the helicopter was stunning, thudding inside his head. What he'd seen of the ocean appalled him. White, frenzied, it seethed and foamed furiously over sand and sea-walls. He would not have been surprised to see it reach up and drag the helicopter down into its demanding depths.

The storm caught the chopper, raised it in the sky like a leaf. Alejandro Bengochea enjoyed it. The weather challenged, even amused him, as if this were a personal test between himself and the vicissitudes of the planet. He took the chopper up and up, forcing it beyond the reaches of pandemonium into a momentary calm, an oasis in the sky.

Through another brief window in the ragged rain squall Pagan saw that the helicopter was directly over water now. Land was no longer visible. Fall from this place and you were a dead man; in that frightening, tumultuous sea your body might never be found.

He constantly scanned the waters. How was it possible to spot anything down there in that fury? And if you stared long enough and hard, you could even begin to hallucinate the appearance of small islands, or whales, or sea-troubled freighters – greys imposed on greys, and nothing distinguishable. Pagan, whose usual determination was weakening, felt the search was hopeless. But Bengochea loved this sea-hunt with all the devotion of a bird-watcher on the trail of a rare species. He wouldn't give up and go back to the shore.

The chopper rocked, lost height, Bengochea laughed; he had a relationship with destiny quite alien to Pagan. Down and down the helicopter went, until it seemed inevitable it would plunge into the water.

“There!” Pagan pointed downward.

A freighter, camouflaged by the sea, pitched. Waves frothed over the deck. The ship looked appallingly insubstantial on the swell, something that might have been set on a pointless journey by a child's hand.

Blinding rain and spray rose up. There was nothing to see, no world beyond violent water, no sky, no ship, nothing.

The freighter seemed to have vanished entirely, leaving Pagan to wonder if, after all, he'd seen anything.

The intensity of the storm overwhelmed Captain Luis Sandoval. His radio had ceased to function, his navigational equipment was useless. Locked in his sightless, airless bridge, a glass prison, he guessed he was some nine miles from Santiago. His first mate was an experienced old seaman named Zaldivar, but even this seasoned mariner had no idea of the exact location of the freighter. The storm reduced perceptions, destroyed instincts, threw men back on guesswork.

Luis Sandoval cursed this weather, this
tormenta
. When he looked up he prayed for a break, a sign of sunlight – but the rains kept coming and the decks were submerged. From the engine room had come an ominous report that about nine inches of water had collected below and that the pumps were labouring. This goddam bitch of a boat! Sandoval thought. This
puta
!

Zaldivar, his white beard grizzly, his face etched by the acid of too many suns, was a superstitious man who blamed the presence of Ruhr and
el proyectil malvado
for the freighter's predicament. Without the crippled
alemán
, none of this would have happened. Hadn't the day begun quietly? Hadn't there been a clear sky and a quiet sea?
Aiee
, it was the fault of the freak with the vile hand. There could be no disputing Zaldivar's nautical logic, grounded as it was in a system that transcended the empirical. The sea operated under the laws of its own gods, who were furious beyond all reason.

Sandoval ceased to listen to the old man's babblings. He peered from the bridge. Along the deck he saw, as if it were a figure from an hallucination, Gunther Ruhr moving toward the hold. A rope was tied round his waist and snaked behind him to some safe point. He was going to secure the missile. Zaldivar rubbed his beard and shook his head as Ruhr opened the hold and vanished into darkness.

“
El Diablo
,” the old sailor remarked quietly.

Sandoval looked upward. Out there in the dense structure of the squall he saw a flying ghost, a bizarre outline that was gone before he was certain he'd ever registered it.

Ruhr could barely catch his breath in the storm. Only when he reached the hold and lowered himself into the darkness were his lungs able to function again. Exhausted by the struggle along the deck, he sat on the floor, breathing fast and hard until his energies returned. He turned on a flashlight and saw how the cruise missile, having slipped one of the mooring cables, lay out of balance. It was no great matter to secure it again. He followed the line of loose cable to a metal hook on the wall and there he anchored it, making certain it was tight. His hands were cold, his fingers stiff.

The freighter rose in the swell, dropped again. The storm was magnificent still. He hauled himself out of the hold, clutching the rough fibres of the damp rope knotted round his waist. The other end of the rope was tethered to the handrail about thirty feet along the deck. He loved the idea of his life hanging by such a feeble lifeline.

He reached the deck.

Seventy feet above him, a grey helicopter swayed in the gale.

Alejandro Bengochea took the chopper down toward the deck of the ship, but it was hard to hold the machine steady against the energetic frenzy of the wind. At sixty feet he was driven back; the chopper swung in a great circle, then returned to roughly the same point. Bengochea, sometimes bellowing with a sportsman's laughter, sometimes quietly coaxing his craft, fought to hold the machine steady. Both chopper and freighter seemed tied together now as if bound by strands of the same rainy web.

Pagan saw the deck briefly, then it was gone under water; up again, wet timbers, an upturned lifeboat, tar-black smoke zipping away from the funnel. The figure who appeared on the deck seemed to have come out of nowhere; he was roped and threading his way astern like a man following a string through a maze.

Pagan, whose stomach came into his throat, felt the helicopter turn at an awful angle, tilting back down toward the ship before righting itself and hovering one more time, like a demented albatross, over the deck. There was the figure again, looking up this time at the chopper.

Pagan recognised the man. As soon as he did so, he took the rope-ladder from behind his seat and pulled it out. “I'm going down,” he said.

Bengochea smiled with approval and gave a thumbs-up sign. Pagan, despite the obstacle of being born English, was a man after his own heart.

The chopper dropped another few feet. The daring Bengochea, the crazy Bengochea, would have landed the machine directly on the deck of
La Mandadera
if he'd had the manoeuvrability. Now the helicopter hung some fifty feet over the deck, dangerously close to the masts of the freighter. The ship, rising and falling twenty-five feet on the vicious swell, threatened at times to crest high enough for its masts to crash into the underside of the chopper or to snag the rotor blades. To avoid this calamity required very fine judgment on Bengochea's part, an instinct for prediction in unpredictable circumstances – two feet higher, then three, four, whatever it took to keep the chopper just beyond the reach of the masts.

Pagan opened his door, was almost sucked out into the skies. It was madness, and he knew it. He also knew there were certain kinds of lunacy you could transcend briefly because the fear of the moment carried you over the hurdle of craziness, imposing upon you an illusion of indestructibility. The notion of throwing down a rope-ladder from a helicopter perched precariously above a freighter sailing in a violent sea seemed almost logical to him just then; and he himself the kind of man who, because he was on the side of the angels, the elements would not destroy.

Sweet Jesus! how frail the rope-ladder looked as it unfolded on its way to the deck.

Alejandro Bengochea dropped as low as he could but the wind bedevilled his machine and he had to rise again another twenty feet, and now the deck seemed a long way down and the rope ladder too flimsy altogether. It blew violently back and forth beneath the chopper, more a means of transportation for a trapeze artist than for a London policeman with a wound in his chest and no great fondness of heights.

Pagan took a breath, stepped out into nothing.

Rain swirled in cold haloes about his head. His hands, gripping the fibrous rope, were red and numb. He hung in the air, defying physics and sanity. He imagined the storm picking him off the ladder and spitting him out into the maelstrom of the sea.

He held on tightly; with the determination of a man who has no desire to look death in its seductive eye, he lowered himself. The storm threatened to suffocate him. He could barely get air into his lungs. Turning his face out of the direct roar of the wind, he gasped.

Gunther Ruhr clutched the sixty-foot rope that would lead him back towards the cabin. His balance on the watery deck was poor and sometimes he slipped, tumbled, but always managed to rise again. Once, seeking a moment's shelter in a doorway, he wiped water from his eyes and observed the man who hung from the rope-ladder. The ladder twisted round and was knocked by the sea-wind back and forth, but the man – the man was unmistakable. And Gunther Ruhr smiled.

It was a fine effort on Pagan's behalf. Ruhr, who realised he had underestimated his adversary, grudgingly admired the sight of the Englishman clinging to the ladder and descending rung by miserable rung toward the deck. Ruhr stepped out of the doorway, and, removing his gun from his belt, he fired once, more as a form of greeting than anything meant to hurt Pagan, who ducked his head and almost slipped from the middle of the ladder to fall the final twenty feet to the deck.

Ruhr continued along the deck, holding hard to the rope. He had thirty, perhaps thirty-five feet to go before he reached the tiny room and the girl. Turning, he looked up again at the acrobat Pagan.

Once, during an August Bank Holiday in Margate when he must have been about nine or ten years old, Pagan had thrown up during a ride on a roller-coaster. He remembered the screaming wind in his face, the shrieks of girls, and the way the thin trail of his vomit had caught the breeze and flown away and how his Aunt Henrietta had shoved a handkerchief into his face with a sigh and a tut-tut and
I
should've known you wouldn't have the constitution for this, Frankie. Silly, silly boy, oh dear, oh dear
…

Where was Auntie Henrietta now when he really needed her? Pagan wondered. What the hell? He needed something more than her big white handkerchief that smelled of mothballs, he needed a bloody weatherproof parachute. The rope ladder was tossed first to the left, then to the right, and Pagan held on, watching Gunther Ruhr move along the deck, waiting for the German to fire the gun again. Ten feet, fifteen, Pagan wasn't sure how far he'd have to drop to hit the deck, but he didn't like his chances anyway. Overhead, the chopper roared and the big blades churned the air; the tumult thrust at Pagan, threatening to blow him back up far enough so that he'd collide with the blades. Hamburger meat. Mince. Razored neatly out of existence.

Oil drums slithered and clattered across the deck, then bounced overboard; a Cuban flag, looking like a used designer tissue, was sucked away, as if it had imploded. On the bridge, Luis Sandoval shook his head in disbelief. The man who was coming down the rope-ladder was clearly
loco
, and so was the pilot of the helicopter. Who these men were, and what their purposes might have been, were matters of no importance to Sandoval. They were intruders. They were no part of any plan. He unlocked the rifle cabinet. He handed a weapon to Zaldivar, and kept one for himself. Both men loaded the weapons then continued to watch the maniac descend from the chopper which, at any moment, was certain to collide with the freighter's masts –
kaboom
!

“He'll never make it to the deck,” Zaldivar said.

Sandoval shrugged. “He might. He's crazy enough.”

“I'm not going out there,” Zaldivar said. “Let the storm take him. Let the storm take the German and his goddam missile as well.”

Inside her cabin Steffie Brough felt the ship tilt, then correct itself again. Water covered the porthole, darkening the cabin. She felt claustrophobic. Even though she knew the deck would be exposed and unsafe, she needed to get out of this wretched coffin. She couldn't breathe. She'd been in this stale little room for too long. She wanted air, rain in her face. Mainly she didn't want to be here when Ruhr came back with his knife. Especially that. It was better to get out and take her chances with the weather than to wait in this place for his return.

She tried the door, but it was locked. She yanked on the handle – nothing. The ship listed again, and she was thrown back across the bunk. She got up, hammered on the door, but of course nobody came to answer because nobody heard her voice.

The only voice in the world was that of the wind.

Was the storm faltering? Losing some fraction of its power? It was hard to tell because it was a deceptive thing, dying for thirty calm seconds then flaring up again just as you imagined it was fading. In one such lull Frank Pagan hit the deck, bent his knees, curled his body forward to spare himself the jarring effect of contact between skeleton and wood. He lost his balance at once, slid on his back and skidded toward the side of the freighter, seized a rail, held on, his mouth and eyes flooded with salt water. He blinked, saw Gunther Ruhr some yards ahead.

Staying upright was impossible. Pagan fell again, tumbled forward, came to a halt on his arse. Ruhr looked back, fired his gun, Pagan pulled his head involuntarily to one side but the shot was wide anyway. He stood again and aquaplaned a few feet as the freighter creaked then listed to the starboard side. The ocean swept the deck and Pagan, with as much strength as he could still muster, clenched the rainslicked handrail.